Few women writers in Brazil have had the superb critical and commercial success which this {Paulista} novelist and short story writer has achieved nationally and internationally. Among several other awards, she has won four Jabutis and the Camo es for her entire {oeuvre.} Curiously enough, not many Brazilian writers, male or female, have published {cro nicas} as rarely as she has. Her writings very often mix and fuse fact and fiction, though, which is probably the case in this volume officially cataloged in Brazil as a collection of both short stories and {cro nicas.} It might be up to each reader to decide which is which. It is quite possible that the genre that best applies to at least three of the 19 texts gathered here is memoir, for their length, language and subject matter: "Elzira," about her great aunt who died at the age of 20 because of racial prejudice in the family; "Quermesse" (Church Bazaar), on her own adventures as a little girl; and "Fim de primavera" (End of Spring), recalling her conversations with high profile intellectuals at a bookshop during her college years in Sa o Paulo. Though all texts are narrated in first-person (nearly all of which employing free indirect speech), the other 16 titles carry esthetic attributes more typically associated with the {cro nica}: light tone, wit, humor, colloquial and economical language, focus on day-to-day deeds, plus a degree of intimacy and complicity with the reader. While the two most comical pieces discuss a bill to do away with cemeteries and contrast biographies of Brazilian romantic poets, one text describes the irony of a conversation with two humble and illiterate people at the Brazilian Academy of Letters and another reveals the narrator's anguish at trying to find something interesting on TV on a Carnaval evening. Loyal readers of Telles' fiction may find several {cro nicas} insightful in regards to the genesis of her works.