A genius of erotic minimalism, Anatole Vasanpeine is a little-known (and imaginary) character from the early 20th century town of Poitiers. History remembers him for one extraordinary trait: his passionate love not for whole things but for small details, in other words for the intimate, anonymous and tragic world that surrounds us.

Alberto Manguel is an Argentinian-Canadian writer, translator, editor and critic, born in Buenos Aires in 1948. He has published several novels, and non-fiction, including Fabulous Monsters, Packing My Library, Curiosity, With Borges, A History of Reading, The Library at Night and (together with Gianni Guadalupi) The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. He has received numerous international awards, among others the Commander of the Order of Arts & Letters from France, the Formentor Prize and the Alfonso Reyes Prize in 2017, and the Gutenberg Prize 2018. He is doctor honoris causa of the universities of Ottawa and York in Canada, and Liège in Belgium and Anglia Ruskin in Cambridge, UK. Until August of 2018 he was the director of the National Library of Argentina. He lives in New York.