Internal combustion

The selection of stories presented below was the result of an editorial project for academic purposes carried out in 2022 as part of the curriculum of our Hispanic Literature degree program. At that time, we were studying the subject of Publishing Processes, taught by professor and editor Sandra Reyes Carrillo in the eighth semester, in which we had to undertake a publishing project. This book is the result of that project.

Of all the options available to the group, they decided to work with the work of Laura, who was a fellow sixth-semester undergraduate student and whose creative work they were able to access thanks to her participation in the degree program's literary magazine, Pirocrom, where she was published in issue XX and later became part of the editorial board. The stories were selected by the author herself, and she suggested their arrangement in the anthology, with the first ones focusing on the early stages of life and the last ones focusing on adulthood or early old age.

The title of the work, Internal Combustion, transports the reader to a hostile space that is constructed within the individual; one that slowly eats away at them, just as the obsession with each of the characters who star in their stories does: the eyes in "Los ojos del canario" (winner of the 13th Elena Poniatowska National Narrative Competition and published in Punto en línea), the cups in "Bébeme a mí," the windows in "Un agujero en la pared," and the snails in "¿Qué se siente?" Hence, the cover illustration conceived for that original project was a man being devoured by gastric acid, an image described in "¿Qué se siente?" that portrays the knot in the stomach that forms when we are prey to our own instincts.

Similarly, the illustrations were commissioned by Laura and carefully crafted with illustrator Alix Lizeth López Venegas to reflect both the character of the literary texts and what Laura saw in her creative work. Thus, from several sketches, a final image was created with a powerful force comparable to that of the stories that inspired them.

To you, reader, her fellow graduates present five stories written by one of the most amazing people they have ever known. Although each story is different and presents distant circumstances that push its characters to transcend both their mental and physical limits, you will find in them a specific theme that allows you to decipher them as one: obsession, the obsession that eats away, the obsession that permeates; the obsession that destroys.