Los niños tontos (The Foolish Children) is a collection of twenty-one stories written by Ana María Matute, first published in Madrid in 1956 by Ediciones Arión. The protagonists of the stories are children, hence the title, however it is not children's literature: themes such as death and cruelty appear in all of the stories. The adjective tontos ("foolish") refers to the children's condition of being marginalized or excluded both from the adult world and from the world of children, for reasons including physical deformity, illness, and social class differences. Source: Wikipedia (en)