"The one and only novel by renowned Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso - Latin America's most expansive miniaturist, whose tiny, acid, and bracingly surreal narratives Italo Calvino has dubbed "the most beautiful stories in the world". The Rest Is Silence presents the reader with the kaleidoscopic portrait of a provincial Mexican literary critic, one Eduardo Torres, a sort of Don Quixote of the Sunday supplements, whose colossal misreadings are matched only by the scale of his vanity. Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres's friends, relations, and servants (their accounts skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant's own comically botched attempts at "criticism.""--