Keeping Up Appearances
(Guardar las formas)

A collection of twelve ways to put things down in writing, twelve risky situations where loneliness, money, technology and death provoke empathy, fascination and thrills.

A man locks himself away in a house, while a writer gets locked into a style. A woman sees double the bottles and the narrator sees twice the adjectives. A local hooligan isn’t sure whether his neighbors have hit the lottery, but he’s been chosen to be a first-person story. An immigrant receives three hours of silence on her cell phone, and the author writes an ellipsis. There is also a dying old man who burns all his books, a letter written to a little girl long ago, a guy who tries to not commit his crime, a boy who makes a mess with a VHS player and a retiree who records his encounters with life.