Book excerpt: A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Original Selection Hamburg: home of a lapsed writer and his statistician girlfriend. He is part of the 41 percent of the German population that hasn’t read a single book in the last three months; she decides to make up a game. The rules of the game are these: the two of them travel to a European city, separately, and try to find each other. They make no calls, leave no messages. They wander through Madrid, Munich, Coimbra. When they meet, they return home. But what happens if they don’t? “The Peculiar State” is a haunting, mischievous new story from Patricio Pron, one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists and the author of My Fathers’ Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain. A thought-provoking, city-hopping story from one of South America’s most important new writers. An eBook short.