Vall de la Ville’s short stories show the hidden side of the real. Her characters give life to humorous and ironic situations that, impregnated with pop culture references, tackle on relevant current issues as immigration, disarray and solitude, diversity, violence, love and the risks human beings run by simply being alive. Throughout the book, a woman looks for her lover at a hotel lost in the middle of nowhere in the US-Canada border, to find her using a cactus as musical instrument. An immigrant without plan A or plan B ends up in a little town in NJ and while navigating the new landscape discovers a Bermuda Triangle, receives an unexpected visit and finds in a Paul Klee tattoo the offer of a sense of warmth she had thought lost. A couple of punk rockers explore a savage city feeling that everything will disappear in a second, knowing that everything is disintegrating and will end in the explosion of a camera flash. Throughout the book these fragmented lives reconfigure themselves, give each other company and build for them and for the reader a tender invisible nation without certainties but full of possibilities.

Keila Vall has a very unique voice. She’s sophisticated and vehement. Her writing proves that organizing memory is a way of administering despair. All the stories of Ana no duerme confirm her talent and her extraordinary capacity to transform the exterior world in an intimacy.

The subtle prose, poetic turns, the way in which the skein of the fabulous develops into the delicate forms of suggestive structures, are some of Keila Vall de la Ville’s fiction writing attributes. Ana no duerme reveals the characters’ metaphysical realities after a meticulous observation of their behavior. Interior monologues play a determinant role, and fictional matter transcends tangible spaces, penetrating the most intimate individual problems, recreating interior experiences through visceral and sensorial perceptions.

A bottle spins at the center of these stories: the tip and the base point to intersections, to the characters’ encounters and also missed encounters: to women facing brutal realities, men that are also spirits and spirits that are men, always departing, always going somewhere; they never stay, they are always moving, inapprehensible as tenuous lights; they are candles that are lit and suddenly turn off in the imagery if this young author.