The World's Furniture

Menéndez Salmón returns to the genre in which he is an absolute master, the short story, with a collection of tales that span two decades of writing and that cover some of his great themes, treated with a philosophical foundation in the tradition of authors such as Borges, Onetti, Kafka or Saramago.

On the way to Charles Mingus’s funeral in Mexico with his jazz quartet, Peyton wakes up after a boozefilled bender with two crystal clear realisations: the woman he slept with last night has robbed him of his money, his suit and his harmonica; and his band have left him for dead and run off to a beach in Acapulco. A boy, trapped with a group of people dying of starvation in a closed train carriage, finds his only crumb of consolation peering through a small crack in the wood. Jaime, obsessed with data, believes every life can be reduced to numbers, including his own: 36 robberies, 3 murders, 2 properties, 2 children, 1 ex-wife, 1 Brazilian girlfriend and 1 Suzuki.