The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told features some of the best short fiction to emerge from the pens of Goans living in India and abroad over the last century, in English and superbly translated from the Portuguese, Konkani, and Marathi. The storytellers included range from eminent writers such as Laxmanrao Sardessai and Vimala Devi to contemporary writers like Damodar Mauzo, Ramnath Gajanan Gawade, Jessica Faleiro, and Derek Mascarenhas.

The collected stories cover subjects as wide, diverse, and absorbing as the Goan people— from iron ore mining in Epitácio Pais’s ‘A Story about Mines’ and Pundalik Naik’s ‘The Palm Tree’ and the agrarian village lifestyle in Mahableshwar Sail’s ‘The Yoke’ and Prakash S. Parienkar’s ‘The Sacrifice’, to diasporic experiences in Selma Carvalho’s ‘Bed Blocker No. 10’ and Roanna Gonsalves’s ‘Curry Muncher’, and patriarchal family structures in Nayana Adarkar’s ‘The Protector’. Goa threads these stories together—its varied characters from various communities and religions, its colourful people, its Portuguese colonial history, its picturesque landscape, and the general aura surrounding the place.

Selected and edited by Manohar Shetty, the twenty-seven stories in this anthology are proof that there’s more to Goa than hats and sunglasses, printed shirts and shorts, cameras, seafood, and holidaymakers frolicking on its beaches.