All eras have been contemporary, but the contemporary has always been indefinable from the present. Where does it begin and where does it end? How can we name it? Twenty authors from eight countries—on both sides of the Atlantic, from the North and the South—come together to sketch the individual and social features of our time—from art to economics and from culture to technology. Texts with strength and character that reveal a vibrant cross-section of the world and of thought in Spanish. Letras Libres and Gris Tormenta undertake a search for the concepts that mark the present: a meticulous and suggestive selection of articles from the magazine’s vast archive give form and vigor to this anthology—essays that were published in the first two decades of Letras Libres: the first two decades of our century.