When Etgar Keret performed compulsory military service in his native Israel, the tragic death of his best friend changed his life. One of the most radical consequences of that event is precisely this book. Written when the author was barely twenty years old, Tuberías exhibits the portentous talent of the Israeli storyteller in a different way to his later works. Through the pages of this, his first collection of stories, we see the anger and bewilderment of a young man who, like many in that country, had to face the idea of ​​death in an untimely and violent way. Keret found in literature a highway for catharsis. Through it he unburdened the power of his mind like a prey releases its load by opening the metal gate that holds it. Piping captivated readers and critics since its appearance, after which his stories have not stopped winning converts that are already counted by millions in the more than twenty languages ​​to which his work has been translated.

Edgar Allan Poe says in his Marginalia that "Pure imagination chooses both beauty and deformity." Keret has managed to make that interstitial zone between the beautiful and the deformed an inexhaustible territory. The Keretian magic consists of offering an absolutely disrupted version of reality and yet getting their characters and the situations they face have an intimate resonance in our own fears, desires, small pleasures, buried motives.

A soldier who for sport runs over an old man in Gaza (and defends himself saying "I have not run over any person, I have run over an Arab"), a Geshternaj who cries with happiness because he has finally been able to feed on a happy dream, a man who buys a book that fulfills his promise to explain the meaning of life for 19.99 shekels, another one whose life is unexpectedly broken after the plague of the firstborn strikes its population, and one more man who accesses to the sky of the misfits through a pipe that forms a magic loop that allows it to disappear, are just some examples of the feverish imagination of Etgar Keret, in whose somewhat dystopian vision of the world we find, strangely, the tools to move and pity for our species.