Institut Ramon LLull

In delicate prose of high emotional voltage, these nineteen rabidly contemporary short short stories hang together to create a kaleidoscopic view of the pretty cages lined with possessions we build for ourselves —as individuals, as professionals, as spouses, as parents, as children—only to find ourselves rattling their bars.

Marta Orriols allows us to peek into the lives of others, only to find they are as deluded as we are about what they want, how much control they have over their lives, and how little freedom they exert in our day-to-day relationships. Hers is a lucid portrait —finely tuned with a warm, generous, unconditionally loving use of language that makes these revelations almost easy to assimilate— of a generation still held back by social conventions and labels, and inexorably subject to the desires and pain intrinsic to the human experience.