Book excerpt: Sentimental Stories by Guatemalan born Enrique Gómez Carrillo, man of letters, duelist and dandy, originally published in 1900 and here presented here in English for the first time in a translation by Jessica Sequeira, is an exquisite selection of nine tales that covers the ground from desire to insanity, fulfillment in erotic love to suffering in intense anguish. In these stories of solitary figures struggling with incorrigible sentimentality, we meet an aspiring poet who becomes obsessed with what he believes to be Cleopatra's wig, an eccentric doctor who sells a cure for artistic enthusiasm to fictional writers and artists, and a military man who suffers from jealousy due to an anonymous letter, all told with the light touch of a writer who found beauty in surfeit and exaggeration, dissolution and extravagance.