In The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning and long overdue tour of modern fiction. In ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’, Haruki Murakami presents a man who believes a giant amphibian is enlisting him to protect his city from an impending earthquake. In ‘War of the Clowns’, Mozambique’s Mia Couto sketches a perfect allegory for our divided culture. In the predecessor story to her iconic novel The Vegetarian, Han Kang depicts a protagonist quietly undergoing an unlikely transformation in a high-rise in Seoul. A Colm Tóibín character thinks, ‘I do not even believe in Ireland’, while Carol Bensimon reflects from Brazil, ‘All great ideas seem like bad ones at some point’. Salman Rushdie brings us to unsettled rural India, Olga Tokarczuk to a circus exhibit, Abdellah Taïa to the queer Arab world, Ted Chiang to a far-off galaxy.