Walking Words

Walking Words is a unique collaboration between the world-renowned author Eduardo Galeano and the Brazilian woodcut artist Jose Francisco Borges - a brilliant feat of storytelling in the tradition of Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales. With the same literary genius that Galeano applied to his epic history of the Americas, Memory of Fire, he here tells, as he puts it, "the stories of ghouls and fools that I'd like to write, voices I've collected in my dreamlike wanderings or heard in my wakeful dreams". Galeano's narrative sources are to be found in the folklore of rural and urban Latin America, but this is far more than an exercise in literary anthropology. Instead, these tales and riddles and aphorisms and paradoxes become testaments to the power of stories to make and remake and enchant the world. Through the medium of Galeano's eloquent language and Borges's equally rich images, "reality" stands revealed as a poor imitation of the real magic of human life and imagination.