Espresso Spanish Classics

The nineteenth century was Spain’s most novelistically fertile period. It is also 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.

Hispanic Heritage Month

From the fifteenth of September to the fifteenth of October, the United States keeps Hispanic Heritage Month. What this series has to offer it is narrow and particular: novels from nineteenth-century Spain, one published and one on the way.

Alarcón’s Andalusia is millers and magistrates and a great deal of arguing. Pardo Bazán’s Madrid is a city where a woman spends one hot day doing as she likes, and the rest of a novel accounting for it.