The Brothers Grimm protected their stories under the motto: "Then when wishing was still useful." There was a remote arcadia in which fairies rewarded hope. Novelist, playwright, author of children's stories, Juan Villoro understands reading as a return to the elusive and meritorious moment when pleasure has its opportunity.

The usefulness of desire continues the adventure begun in the essay books Personal Effects and That's About It, also in Anagrama. On this new scale, Villoro deals, among other topics, with the inexhaustible island of Daniel Defoe, speed and guilt in Nikolai Gogol, the art of condemning by Karl Kraus, the empathy of the pen with the scalpel, the fable of the conscience of Peter Handke, the unusual similarities between the incomparable Ramón López Velarde and James Joyce, the enigmas of translation, the tension between truth and lies in Gabriel García Márquez and the private letters of Julio Cortázar, Juan Carlos Onetti and Manuel Puig; He does it with a rigor and depth always combined with a joyful fluidity.

Rodrigo Fresán has pointed out that the roots of a writer are not in the ground but in the walls: they are the books he has read. This volume opens the doors of a house to discover the reverse of a plot: the readings that have formed an author; an author, Juan Villoro, who in The Utility of Desire displays a triumphant mix of erudition, intelligence and originality of vision that infects the text (and the reader) with the same passion that led to writing it.

«I know that at the time of ghosts Villoro would swear as a storyteller, but I have him among our best critics» (Christopher Domínguez Michael).

«The craft of the seasoned critic and the intuition of the genuine creator. Agile, brilliant, multifaceted prose, informed to the point of exhaustiveness» (Miguel García-Posada, ABC).