Spain's great lyric poet, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer (1836-1870), is famed both for his poetry and his fiction. Becquer's celebrated Rhymes consists of sixty-six of the most splendid poems written in Spain in the nineteenth century. As the Alvarez Quintero brothers said, -All his poetry is moonlight.- And the six tales from Becquer's Legends, shimmering between romance and fantasy, show why his prose is recognized as among the best from the Spanish Romantic tradition.
Editor Stanley Appelbaum provides sensitive, accurate English translations on the pages facing the original...

From the creator of Don Quixote, the most famous figure in Spanish literature, comes this trio of popular novellas: "La gitanilla," a gypsy romance; "El coloquio de los perros," a lively dialogue between two dogs; and "Rinconete y Cortadillo," a day in the underworld of eighteenth-century Seville.
Written in the baroque language of Cervantes' era, these works are not easily read in the original Spanish. This new English translation presents as complete and literal an interpretation as possible. The dual-language format offers students and teachers an excellent tool for reading and...

An exquisite medley of lyrical verse and poetic prose, La Vita Nuova (The New Life) ranks among the supreme revelations in the literature of love. Its allegorical view of the soul's crisis and growth combines a narrative with meditations, dreams, songs, and prayers.
In this masterpiece of his youth, Dante assembles a selection of his love poems within a prose framework that situates them chronologically and autobiographically. The result is a history of his love for Beatrice, the muse he encountered in childhood who continued to influence him long after her marriage and early...

This excellent anthology offers the beginning French-language student a first taste of some of the world's most significant prose. Chosen for both their eloquence and ease of reading, excerpts from such masterpieces as Les Miserables, The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary, Carmen, and The Three Musketeers will open new worlds for linguists. Readers will savor the words of fifty great writers of multiple genres from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Baudelaire, Dumas, Proust, and other literary virtuosos.
Lucid and accessible,...

Beginning students of Italian language and literature will welcome this bilingual anthology edited especially for their needs. Ranging from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries, it features the works of Dante, Boccaccio, Pirandello, andfifty-two others in both the original Italian and expert English translations on the facing pages. Selections include excerpts from poetry, fiction, history, and philosophy.
This is a "first reader" in the sense of its introduction to Italian literature from the 1300s to the 1920s. A solid background in Italian grammar is necessary for the fullest...

Greatly influenced by Europe's nineteenth-century literary trends, Mexico's writers crafted some of the most phenomenal prose fiction in Spanish America. This collection offers a rich sampling of significant Mexican short stories published from 1843 to 1918. Nine different tales range from the realism of Lopez Portillo's "Reloj sin dueno" and the modernismo saturating Gutierrez Najera's "La manana de San Juan" to the historical accuracy of Riva Palacio's "Las mulas de Su Excelencia" and the vivid romanticism of "Amor secreto" by Manuel Payno, named the "father of Mexican short stories."...

Geared toward advanced beginners, this dual-language volume offers the convenient, accessible format of English translations on pages facing the matching Spanish text. It introduces such authors as Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Alarcon, Unamuno, and Dario, and such works as El buscon, Cartas marruecas, El estudiante de Salamanca, and Santa. Contents include plays, lyric and narrative verse, and prose of many kinds fiction, philosophy, autobiography, and more for a generous sampling of the Spanish language's extraordinarily diverse and rich literary history.
The selections begin at...

This original dual-language short story collection featuresfifteen newly translated works by important 20th-century authors. Previously unavailable in English versions, these stories cover a diverse range of styles and themes and offer fascinating insights into life and literature in France and French-speaking countries.
Contents include "L'ami et la femme" by Irene Nemirovsky, "Pleure, Pleure " by Andree Maillet, and tales by Simone Schwarz-Bart, Sailesh Ramchurn, Fred Kassak, Yann Means, Marc Villard, and others. The text is completely self-contained no further apparatus or reference is...

Written in 1912, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's best-known novella -- a haunting, elegiac masterpiece in which the main character, Gustav Aschenbach, is a successful and much-revered author. While vacationing in Venice, this highly disciplined writer, who always has maintained extraordinary control of his literary creations, finds himself suddenly overwhelmed by an all-consuming love for a beautiful young boy. A deadly epidemic sweeps through the city, but Aschenbach's attraction to the youth compels him to remain, thus sealing his fate.
The second work in this volume, -A Man and...