Juan Gabriel Vásquez is best known for his 2013 blockbuster novel The Sound of Things Falling. But more than a decade before that book vaulted him onto the international literary stage, he published a well-reviewed collection of short stories in Spanish.

Now, that collection, Lovers on All Saints' Day, is getting an English translation.

"The book as a whole is quite concerned with the idea of a couple revisiting a moment in their past to try to see what they have become and try to salvage what they can," Vasquez tells NPR's Arun Rath. 

"Sadly, in most of the stories, they are not really successful." 

On the collection's composition:

The stories are built in such a way that they communicate with each other, that they echo each other. I had the toughest time just rearranging these stories, placing them in the right order so that idea of stories playing with each other, communicating with each other, really worked in the way I wanted it to work.

You will be curious, maybe, to know that in the first Spanish edition, the order of the stories is not the same as in the English translation, because I came to realize after many years that ... I could use that communication between the stories in a better way if I changed the order. The sum of the parts is more than the total.

Read more here.