This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present day.Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends old favourites and hidden gems - many of which have never before been translated into English - and introduces readers to surprising new voices as well as giants of Spanish literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazán and Leopoldo Alas, through Mercè Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Ana Maria Matute and Javier Marías. Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers.

This is an ambitious and wide-ranging collection of texts from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day, by authors writing in Castilian, Basque, Catalan, and Galician. Very few of the stories have appeared in translation before and while some authors (Goytissolo, Atxaga, Mendoza and Marias) might be known to an English-reading public, most authors have never previously been translated into English. The stories have been selected to give the reader the frisson that one expects from the truly fantastic: from fabulous creatures and ghost stories to doppelgangers, from time travel to metamorphoses. The anthology is enriched by a wide variety of settings, characters, situations, themes and narrative modes which combine to produce one of the most important collections of Spanish literature to appear in English.