My first acquaintance with Portuguese fiction was, unsurprisingly, with The Book of Disquiet. A book that I read as I would a collection of short stories, picking the book up at whim, reading a fragment here, another there. There is very little short fiction from Portugal available in translation and you will notice that my selections draw from just two publishers. What does exist in translation, however, is certainly enough to whet the appetite and to highlight Portugal’s remarkable contribution to the art of the short story.