There are repeated motifs of the nature of memory, as explored in the story `Just Before Falling Asleep' and `The Green Heart', and more extensively in `The Stray Horse' where the narrator is aware of an impending attempt to distort a series of childhood memories, for if a person were capable of changing his memories, as one changes stage settings, would that not result in a different person inhabiting the present? In `The Flooded House' a widow has decided that water has the inherent quality required for nurturing memory: 'water is the place to grow memories, because it transforms everything reflected in it and it's receptive to thought.' (Hernandez, P.246) The adjectives befitting the overall `feel' of the Piano Stories would be: elegant, absurd, surreal and otherworldly. The introduction is penned by Italo Calvino - another major writer who was apparently influenced by Hernandez. It features fifteen pieces, two of them being short novellas (`The Stray Horse' and `The Daisy Dolls') and some others no more than a page and a half long. It is meant to serve as a representative exhibition of the writer's career. Piano Stories, so named by the publishers because nearly every single story incorporates a piano, is the first collection of Felisberto's work translated into English. Today, he is hardly known outside of Latin American literature and yet has inspired the so-called `magical realism' literary movement, made popular in the works of the Nobel-prize winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He took up writing somewhat later in life, remained more or less anonymous up to his death.

He traveled extensively, performing concerts. There is somewhat of a mystery surrounding him: he was a pianist who used to work accompanying silent movies.

The oddness of Felisberto Hernandez, the man, may perhaps eclipse the essential weirdness of his fictions.

Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández