The Penguin book of Dutch short stories.

For anyone interested in European literature these stories are an undiscovered snapshot of some of the most interesting and important writing of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

From the same culture that consistently draws worldwide attention for its groundbreaking and avante-garde movements in the visual arts, this collection displays the same playfulness, innovation and sense of humour in Dutch literary movements.

The stories are varied: subversive, profound, hilarious; stylistically experimental and psychologically astute.

The majority of these stories appear here in English for the first time, and many of these names will be unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences.

Dutch writers have been gaining a swell of praise in recent years, and have been lauded by figures such as J.

M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera and John Updike.