A journey dialogued with amusingness and wit, a demonstration of the author's extraordinary ability to reason, transmit and spread his passions.

Juan Villoro is recognized as one of the great Latin American writers of today. Journalist, novelist, short story writer, essayist and chronicler, he first brought together his literary essays in Efectos personales (Mazatlán Prize 2001), followed by De eso se trata (2004), titles that we bring together today in this volume. As he also did in the later La inútil del deseo (2017), here Villoro turns his readings into stories of intelligence. Both works show a narrator immersed in the adventure of reading; the anecdotes follow one another as in a novel and the comments emerge with the wit of a happy gathering.

An exceptional gallery of characters pass through these pages: Goethe trapped in the geometry of love; Cervantes, founder of the road novel; Rousseau, who links his destiny to the risky notion of author; Lowry in the intoxicated paradise of Cuernavaca. We also find a testimony of elective affinities: a reconstruction of Burroughs' turbulent stay in Mexico; the investigation of Bernhard's posthumous exile; Monterroso's illustrated garden; Fuentes' more heterodox side; Pitol's customs-free journey; Rossi's distracted intelligence. Along with these – and other – tributes and portraits, there is space for Villoro the chronicler and for the one who explores the rites of passage of literary translation and the dialogue between the literatures of America and Europe.

"To rehearse: to read in company," defines Villoro. A journey dialogued with amenity and wit, proof of the author's extraordinary virtue to reason, transmit and spread his passions.

«If Barthes spoke of the “pleasure of the text”, Juan Villoro offers us an extraordinary “pleasure of reading”» (Gérard de Cortanze, Le Figaro Litteraire); «Juan Villoro is one of the authors who best thinks about literature today» (Patricio Pron, Babelia).