"A new collection of electric, searing stories from award-winning, bestselling author Juan Gabriel Vasquez. The characters in Songs for the Flames are men and women touched by violence -- sometimes directly, sometimes only in passing--but whose lives are changed forever, consumed by fire, and by unexpected encounters and unyielding forces. A photographer becomes obsessed with the traumatic past that an elegant woman, a fellow guest staying at a countryside...

"A group of women contemplate violence after they're sent into foreign territory to make husbands of the enemy. A support network of traumatized joggers meets to discuss the bodies they've found on their runs. And a town replaces its Confederate monument with a rotating cast of local residents. Slippery but muscular, sly but electric, this stunning debut collection moves from horror to magical realism to satire with total authority. In these stories,...