Association, M: Trastornos de Caracter

The stories of Juan Jos Mill s, who began writing in the 1970s, depart from both the socially engaged, traditional realism and the linguistic experimentation of post-Francoist Spain. They are populated by strange characters: a man who discovers a passage that connects all the armoires on earth, a woman who finds her obsessions to be better company than her cats, a vacationer who prefers his pancreas to the Bahamas as a destination. Influenced by both Gabriel Garc a Marqu z and Franz Kafka and resonant with Freudian concepts, Mill s's fiction--ironic, humorous, dreamlike--raises questions about identity, society, and what is normal.

In her introduction, Pepa Anastasio places Mill s in the context of modern Spain and provides commentary on the style and themes of a contemporary writer little of whose work has yet appeared in English translation.