Things  

These very short stories, which approach prose poems in their lyric intensity, are Alfonso R. Castelao's contribution to a popular Galician art form. Partly based on stories his grandmother told him as a child, Things reflects Galician society at the beginning of the twentieth century, allowing us a glimpse of the fragments of a rapidly vanishing world.

Castelao was no backward-looking sentimentalist, however, and the stories gathered here forced his contemporaries to reflect on the nation's weaknesses as much as its virtues. The tool he chose for this was humour, or retranca: the deadpan statement of the obvious, the subtle irony of the understatement, the dark, corrosive and macabre humour of which he was a master.

Castelao was an accomplished artist, and his illustrations (a feature also of the original edition, first published in 1926) make the book an unusual creative whole.

Considered one of the finest works of fiction to have appeared in Galician, Things makes trhis stunning book available to English-language readers for the first time.