Dance of the Shadows

Description: "An intelligent synthesis of verisimilitude and fantastic events full of mystery, reveals an intelligent investigation of passions through the psychology of the characters, drawn in an accurate and concise way. In these stories narrated with economy of language that border on literary minimalism, Maria Gabriela Madrid uses humor and irony, in its sense of distancing. These are fictions interwoven with traces of everyday reality and imagination, clearly marking the dividing line between reality and the purest literary fiction in which the characters that populate the stories unfold, resulting in a playful discursive universe where the literary formal and the expressed reality are intermingled, offering the reader a unique product in its creative originality"
The Editors (Circle of Writers of Venezuela)
(Full commentary within the book)

"For poets like me, immersing myself in a short story is fascinating. Since I began reading Chekhov, Poe, Horacio Quiroga, Maupassant, Onetti, and re-reading Borges with a new, inquisitive eye, I have taken immense pleasure in this genre and I find in Maria Gabriela's book the application of the secrets of the masters. She does not use unnecessary adjectives or distract the character with secondary matters. She writes with clarity. She does not describe the psychic world of the characters; they reveal themselves through their thoughts and actions."
-Carmen Cristina Wolf (Poet and President of the Circle of Writers of Venezuela).
(Full commentary within the book)

"Maria Gabriela Madrid sets out to show us how our society has been empty, how the couple vanishes in marriage, when two people are united for the sole reason of not having anyone else. The author questions us, tacitly asks us if we are like them, if we love in pieces, if we abandon, if we have children to fulfill, if what matters to us is appearance, the image of the happy couple, the image of the perfect mother, the image of the 21st century woman, the one who only seeks to show off."
-Isabel Cecilia Gonzáles Molina (Writer and Director of the Writers' Circle of Venezuela) (Full commentary within the book)