Part of the Bristol Classical Press series of Spanish texts, this is Horacio Quiroga's story "Cuentos Escogidos". The series is designed to meet the needs of the fast-growing A Level and undergraduate market for texts in the Spanish language. Each text comes with English notes and vocabulary, and with an introduction by an editor with an expert knowledge both of the work and of its literary and cultural context. Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), a celebrated writer of the short story, played a leading role in the Modernist movement that emerged in Buenos Aires at the turn of the century. His stories combine something of Guy de Maupasant and Edgar Allan Poe, sharing Poe's interest in the strange and the abnormal but seldom straying from a realistic setting or psychological verisimilitude. This edition situates Quiroga in his literary and historical context and explores the central theme of his work - the conflict between man and environment.

Author Biography

Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was born in Uruguay and is best known for short stories he wrote during the years he lived in two remote regions - the Chaco region that borders on Bolivia and Misiones, an area in northern Argentina that had once belonged to the Jesuit missions. He worked in both these rugged areas as a pioneer farmer, battling with the fiercely hostile conditions that he later described in his terse stories. His published collections included Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte (1917), Cuentos de la selva (1918) and Anaconda (1921). An acknowledged master of the short story form, Quiroga compares with Kipling, particularly in his interest in animal protagonists, although the stoical and unsentimental style is uniquely his own. Although he uses some regional vocabulary, the stories are not difficult to understand for students with a grasp of basic grammar. They provide an excellent starting point for those who are graduating from language learning to reading literary texts. Short stories included: - Nuestro primer cigarro - La insolacion - El alambre de pua - Yaguai - Anaconda - Los fabricantes de carbon - En la noche - Los pescadores de vigas - La voluntad - El simun - A la deriva - El hombre muerto - El yaciyatere - Tacuara-Mansion