A series from Espresso Publishing House

Espresso Spanish Classics

Nineteenth-century Spanish fiction, newly translated into English.

The nineteenth century was Spain's most novelistically fertile period — and one of the least known to English-language readers. While France was producing Balzac and Zola, while Russia was in the midst of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Spanish writers were doing something equally ambitious and far less noticed: recording a country in the grip of rapid, destabilising change, from Andalusia's whitewashed towns to the granite coast of Galicia, through the lens of comedy, realism, and a particular kind of social precision that had no exact equivalent elsewhere in European fiction.

The Espresso Spanish Classics series is an effort to bring that tradition into view. Each title is a new translation made directly from the original Spanish, with a full editorial apparatus: introduction, translator's note, and the historical framing that allows a contemporary reader to approach the work on its own terms. All titles in the series are translated by Inés Bou.

Titles in the Series

The Three-Cornered Hat

The Three-Cornered Hat

El sombrero de tres picos  ·  Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, 1874

Translated and introduced by Inés Bou

Kindle & Paperback · Published May 2026

Andalusia, early nineteenth century. His Worship the Corregidor is the law — at least, so long as he keeps his hat on his head. When the magistrate comes calling at the mill on the road outside the city to pursue the beautiful miller's wife, neither the authority of his three-cornered hat nor the splendour of his scarlet cloak will protect him from Tía Frasquita's wit or her husband's cunning.

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's masterpiece of Andalusian folk comedy was the inspiration for Manuel de Falla's celebrated 1919 ballet — designed by Picasso, choreographed by Massine, produced by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. This is its first modern English literary edition.

Kindle — $4.99 Paperback — $12.99

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Sunstroke: A Love Story November 2026

Insolación  ·  Emilia Pardo Bazán, 1889

Translated and introduced by Inés Bou

Kindle & Paperback · Forthcoming November 2026

Madrid, the feast of San Isidro. Asís Taboada — a young Galician widow of good family, well settled in the city — goes to the popular festival with Diego Pacheco, an Andalusian charmer of uncertain intentions. The next morning she wakes with no clear account of the afternoon. The novel turns on the gap between what she knows happened and what she is prepared to admit — and on her gradual, reluctant recognition that she has fallen in love.

Emilia Pardo Bazán was the most formidable novelist of nineteenth-century Spain — and the most persistently misread in English, where her work has been pressed into the shape of Spanish Naturalism when it is something more precise and more interesting than that. This translation, made by Inés Bou from the original Spanish, treats the novel as the comedy of manners and character study it is: a book about the friction between Galician restraint and Andalusian warmth, and what happens when the wrong person refuses to behave as expected.

Forthcoming November 2026. Pre-order link will be added when available.

About the translator

Inés Bou grew up in Barcelona, moving between Catalan at home and Castilian at school — a transit between languages she managed without thinking about it until she began studying literature and recognised it had shaped her all along. She took her degree in Spanish and Comparative Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona and her MA at University College London, where her thesis on Emilia Pardo Bazán argued that every English translator of that novelist had rendered her wrong in the same way: as a Spanish follower of Zola, when she is emphatically Galician — shaped by a northern world with almost nothing to do with Paris. Inés translates from Spanish for Espresso Publishing House.

Read more about Inés Bou and the Espresso Spanish Classics →