Life in The Republic, a nation at once timeless and impossible, is a man lying in a road waiting to die, a scholar and a former death squad commander meeting at the crest of a high-rise office building, students disappearing into unmarked vans, and buses flying from cliffs. These seven stories bear the brand of a place that seems to operate according to its own laws of space and time, so different from the physics of our own world that simply to go there is to risk getting hopelessly lost, without a map to show the way out.