The task of curating an anthology of Spanish short stories is an unimaginably daunting one that, in this instance, fell to award-winning British translator Margaret Jull Costa. There are few people better equipped to tackle such an ambitious project; working from both Spanish and Portuguese, Jull Costa has translated the likes of Fernando Pessoa, Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. And yet, in Jull Costa’s words, the selection process ‘was both a delight and a torment’. How does one begin to distil fourteen decades of literature, across four distinct languages, into four hundred pages?

In her brief introduction to the collection, Jull Costa admits that omissions were unavoidable (notably, Cervantes Prize-winner Juan Goytisolo and Nobel Prize-winner Camilo José Cela). Such omissions must be forgiven; rather than seeing this book as a prescription for essential reading, one would be wise to regard it as a generous posy of stories hand-picked by a single translator. As Jull Costa writes: ‘An anthology, etymologically speaking, is a gathering or collection of flowers, and in this anthology my aim has been to gather a collection of really fine flowers.’

In her reaping, Jull Costa claims to have prioritised stories that had not previously been translated into English, or that she felt ‘would benefit from a fresh translation’. Framing the collection in this way seems to have resulted in a greater concentration of obscure, minor works. (Valle-Inclán’s story ‘Malpocada’, for instance, was wrested from deep within a 1920 edition of the author’s Complete Works; it doesn’t appear to have been published since.) As a result, the book feels less like a literary authority – a role suggested, I would venture, by the Penguin imprimatur – than a bookcase of curios.

This vast and dissimilar collection of cuentos (short stories) is organised more or less chronologically, beginning with nineteenth-century Spanish realist Benito Pérez Galdós and concluding with thirty-three-year-old Basque novelist Aixa de la Cruz. The collection includes stories by some of the twentieth century’s greatest Catalan writers (Mercè Rodoreda, Josep Pla), a number of lesser-known Galician writers (Álvaro Cunqueiro, Eduardo Blanco Amor, Manuel Rivas), and a handful of contemporary Basque authors writing in Euskara (Bernardo Atxaga, Karmele Jaio, Harkaitz Cano, Eider Rodríguez). There are plenty of big names scattered throughout: Miguel de Unamuno, Javier Marías, Ana María Matute, Azorín, and Clarín.

True to Jull Costa’s desire to be broadly representative, the book is equally diverse in its treatment of genre; Teresa Solana’s dark-humoured crime fiction sits cheek by jowl with Javier Cercas’s micro-memoir ‘Against Optimism’. The stories also vary wildly in length; some, such as Pérez Galdós’s ‘The Novel on the Tram’, are fleshy enough to get comfortable in, while others are almost photographic, barely filling two pages. The effect is one of randomness: these are stories gathered together on the thin pretext of their shared ‘Spanishness’, a concept that, at the end of it all, one is no closer to understanding. Despite the brief author biographies crammed into the footnotes of each story, there is a disorienting lack of context: grim war tales and snippets of nostalgia seem to float in a timeless ether, lacking a dedicated introduction to tether them to history.

That said, I should confess: I was given fair warning. In her introduction, Jull Costa cautions against devouring this collection too quickly, she advises readers to treat it like ‘a box of chocolates; savour and ponder each story one or, at most, two at a time’. Constrained by my duties as a reviewer, I ignored her, and consumed this book at a dizzying speed (which, coincidentally, is also how I tend to approach chocolate). No surprise, then, that I was left with a headache at the end of it. Before tackling such a hefty opponent, I might also have considered Julio Cortázar’s famous words: ‘The novel wins by points; the short story wins by knockout.’

Some of the stories in this anthology are knockouts. Rodoreda’s ‘Like Silk’ gleams like a jewel, and de la Cruz’s horror piece on new motherhood, ‘True Milk’, is a wonderfully macabre finale. Some, such as Cristina Fernández Cubas’s ‘A Fresh Start’, are perfect exemplars of the short story form, though not by coincidence – Fernández Cubas is widely recognised as one of Spain’s finest short story writers, and has authored seven acclaimed collections since the 1980s. In this collection, however, she is an exception; most of the stories gathered here were written not by masters of the short story form but by novelists.

Since Don Quixote tilted at the windmills of La Mancha, the novel has reigned supreme in the realm of Peninsular Spanish letters; indeed, the novel remains Spain’s greatest and most enduring contribution to world literature. Spain also has a rich dramatic history – borne out in the work of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and, later, Federico García Lorca – and a deep poetic tradition, from the Mozarabic love poetry of the tenth century to el Cantar de mío Cid (the earliest surviving monument of Castilian literature) to the ballads or romances of the fifteenth century. The history of the cuento is less illustrious, or perhaps simply less clearly defined. Jull Costa attempts to trace its beginnings back to ‘the Arab tradition of storytelling’ (which, like any oral tradition, is a rather nebulous starting point), then to the Siglo de Oro novel Lazarillo de Tormes, a historically important work – it pioneered an entirely new literary genre: the picaresque novel – that has only tenuous ties to the short story form.

Cervantes’s 1613 work Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Tales), based on the structure of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, is thought to be the earliest example of novelas (or novelle: short stories after the Italian manner) in Spanish. The short story as we know it, however, blossomed relatively late in Spain. When the form did eventually take off in the late nineteenth century, it was adopted mainly by novelists – Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Clarín – and was always, inevitably, overshadowed by the novel.

In Latin America, in contrast, the cuento soared to new heights in the twentieth century, surpassing even the novel, in some estimations, as the defining form of the region’s canon. Writers like Borges, Lispector, Rulfo, and Cortázar (among many others) were at their best in the short story form, and their legacy continues with the work of contemporary writers like Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez. No such short story boom took place back on the Iberian Peninsula; in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, poetry, theatre, and the novel resurged in new forms (poesía social, tremendismo, Lorca’s posthumous ‘teatro imposible’), but the short story remained, and remains, somewhat marginal.

It stands to reason, then, that a new book of Spanish short stories must be less an excavation of essential literary works than a convenient repackaging of Spanish fiction – one aimed, perhaps, at a modern readership that would baulk at the idea of reading fifty classic Spanish novels, or plays, or books of poetry. One of the short story’s many strengths is its generosity, its ability to show us an entire world without demanding much in return; or, as Borges put it, ‘to contain everything a novel contains, but without fatiguing the reader’. In that sense, this anthology serves its purpose. Some of the stories it holds are even worth revisiting; it’s to be hoped that many of them will inspire curiosity. Just be sure to consume them in moderation.