Book excerpt: This collection -- "A brilliant fingerprint of the city of Montevideo" (Eduardo Galeano) -- includes the best of renowned Uruguayan writer Mane Benedetti's stories from over 40 years of publishing. In these stories of powerful sudden impact, Benedetti plumbs with deep psychological insight both the dreams and frustrations of the middle-class in a bureaucratic society, as well as the pain and disorientation of political exile. In his On Arts And Professions, Benedetti wrote, "the effect of the short story is the surprise, the astonishment, the revelation."