Mount Orégano

Come to the Madrid Writers Open Mic at 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 24 – tomorrow! – at the café-bookstore El dinosaurio todavía estaba allí, calle Lavapiés 8.

Enjoy poetry, short stories, flash fiction, spoken word and non-fiction in English and Spanish. I will be reading my essay, “Why You Have a Future,” which contains some sort of logical fallacy, but I don’t care.

About the name of the café: It comes from the micro-story “El dinosaurio” [“The Dinosaur”] by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso, published in 1959, which until recently was considered the shortest short story in the Spanish language:

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.
When he (or she or it) woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

The title for the shortest micro-story in Spanish is now held by Mexican author Luis Felipe Lomelí for a work published in 2005, called “El emigrante” [“The Emigrant”]:

«¿Olvida usted algo?» «¡Ojalá!»
“Have you forgotten something?” “I wish I had!”

— Sue Burke