"Manuel Rivas is "an author who knows how to introduce poetry not just into his sentences but into his way of looking at the world." Now, Rivas turns his poetic eye upon his native region with this collection of stories." "A traveling lingerie salesman is helped miraculously by a rock musician as he waits for his son who has run away; a love-addled bank robber botches a job; a sleepy village is abruptly transformed by the onset of the Spanish Civil War. The everyday lives of the memorable Galician characters may be desperately harsh and filled with pain and solitude, but their situations are always redeemed by humor and tenderness in this collection of sixteen short stories by prizewinning Spanish writer Manuel Rivas. Rivas draws on folktales, fantasy, and, most deeply, human psychology to create haunting tiny dramas. Deft and precise, these stories linger long after being read."--BOOK JACKET.