A collection of short stories by 12 contemporary Spanish writers including Javier Cercas and Paloma Diaz-Mas. The settings vary from the exotic (Salome at the court of King Herod, the palace of a Moorish king with a half-mermaid daughter) to the historical (a little boy's experience of life in rural Spain under Franco), the fantastic (travelling the world through a labyrinth of built-in wardrobes) and the Chandleresque "film noir." Each of the stories follows a traveller or travellers, who, in the course of the tale, become lost to reality in some way, or alienated from their expectations...