In 1916, Sa-Carneiro, the great friend of Fernando Pessoa, committed suicide in Paris; he was only twenty-six years old, but he left behind him an extraordinary body of work, dealing obsessively with the problems of identity, madness and solitude. The stories in this collection all date from the author's time in Paris, and all bristle with "his distaste for the banal and the ordinary, his longing for some supreme experience" (Costa).