Spanish short stories
El crimen de la calle de la Perseguida, Los puritanos, La buenaventura, El beso... Esta antología reúne catorce relatos breves de algunos de los grandes maestros de la prosa española del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX, entre ellos Armando Palacio Valdés, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Blasco Ibáñez, Pérez Galdós, Larra, Bécquer y Pereda, junto a dos autores hispanoamericanos de Costa Rica y Chile. La mayoría son cuadros realistas de las costumbres y el carácter de la España moderna; otros se adentran en lo histórico, lo legendario o lo sobrenatural, como la evocación napoleónica de Bécquer o las escenas románticas de Alarcón y Fernán Caballero.
Reunidos y ordenados con fines de lectura, estos cuentos muestran la riqueza y diversidad de la narrativa española en una época de renacimiento cultural tras siglos de decadencia. Sus páginas retratan la vida cotidiana, las creencias populares, la ironía costumbrista y el alma de un pueblo que venera su pasado. La colección importa porque ofrece, en pequeño formato, un retrato vivo de la España contemporánea y permite seguir el crecimiento de su ficción moderna a través de las distintas voces y escuelas literarias.
How it begins
These Spanish Short Stories are, for the most part, realistic pictures of the manners and customs of modern Spain, written by masters of Spanish prose. All were written in the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first decade of the twentieth,—except the story by Larra, which was written about seventy-five years ago. And all describe recent conditions,—except the tale, partly historical and partly legendary, by Bécquer, which goes back to the invasion of Spain by the French under Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century; the story by Larra, which, however, is nearly as true of Castile to-day as it was when written; and Trueba's story, which is partly legendary, partly symbolic, and partly realistic. The stories by Bécquer and Pérez Galdós contain incidents that are supernatural, and those by Fernán Caballero and Alarcón have romantic settings that are highly improbable; but all the stories are, in the main, true to the every-day life of contemporary Spain. The Spanish stories in this collection have been arranged, so far as possible, in the order of difficulty; but some instructors will doubtless prefer to read them in chronological order, or, better still, in an order determined by the "school", or literary affiliations, of each author. This latter arrangement is difficult to make, and it must be, at the best, somewhat arbitrary.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.