Once students have understood the terms and concepts in their own language, it is easier for them to understand their textbook. With simple explanations and numerous examples, this brief handbook compares English and Spanish grammar and points out the similarities and differences.

    As Paul's two students progress, you progress alongside them. A native speaking Spanish expert helps Paul to deliver the course and to perfect your pronunciation.

    With her first taste of dirt, she learns the horrifying truth of her mother’s death. Disturbed by what she witnesses, the woman keeps her visions to herself. But when Earth-eater begins an unlikely relationship with a withdrawn police officer, word of her ability begins to spread, and soon desperate members of her community beg for her help, anxious to uncover the truth about their own loved ones.Surreal and haunting, spare yet complex, Earth-eater is a dark, emotionally resonant tale told from a feminist perspective that brilliantly explores the stories of those left behind—the women enduring the pain of uncertainty, whose lives have been shaped by violence and loss.

    The Queen of Spades has long been acknowledged as one of the world's greatest short stories, in which Pushkin explores the nature of obsession. The Tales of Belkin are witty parodies of sentimentalism, while Peter the Great's Blackamoor is an early experiment with recreating the past. The Captain's Daughter is a novel-length masterpiece which combines historical fiction in the manner of Sir Walter Scott with the devices of the Russian fairy-tale. The Introduction provides close readings of the stories and places them in their European literary context.

    Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor - an attractive married woman and mother - while Polo dreams about quitting his gruelling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme. Written in a chilling torrent of prose by one of our most thrilling new writers, Paradais explores the explosive fragility of Mexican society - with its racist, classist, hyperviolent tendencies - and how the myths, desires, and hardships of teenagers can tear life apart at the seams.

    In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

    As he revisits the details of the investigation, he is reacquainted with his similarly long, unrequited love for Irene Hornos, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Absorbing and masterfully crafted, The Secret in Their Eyes is a meditation on the effects of the passage of time and unfulfilled desire.Eduardo Sacheri’s tale is imbued with the subdued terror that characterized the Dirty War of 1970s Argentina, and was made into the Academy Award winning film of the same name in 2009.

    Surreal, poetic, naturalistic, urbane, peasant-born: All styles intersect and play, often within a single piece. There is "The Handsomest Drown Man in the World," the García Márquez fable of a village overcome by the power of human beauty; "The Aleph," Borges' classic tale of a man who discovers, in a colleague's cellar, the Universe. Here is the haunting shades of Juan Rulfo, the astonishing anxiety puzzles of Julio Cortázar, the disquieted domesticity of Clarice Lispector. Provocative, powerful, immensely engaging, The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories showcases the ingenuity, diversity, and continuing excellence of a vast and vivid literary tradition.

    Over 80,000 words and phrases are provided for those at all levels of language skill, from travellers to business professionals.

    Rich in verbal and situational humour, they offer a fascinating insight into many of the issues which preoccupied Beckett all his working life. As the first novella reveals, nobody writes with quite such cruel and unnervingly clever wit as Beckett...

    The novel presents a series of flashes — scenes, moods, dreams, and weather — as the narrator wanders through Barranco (then an exclusive seaside resort outside Lima). In one stunning passage after another, he skips from reveries of first loves, South Pole explorations, and ocean tides to precise and unashamed notations of class and of race: from an Indian woman "with her hard, shiny, damp head of hair — a mud carving" to a gringo gobbling "synthetic milk, canned meat, hard liquor."As the translator notes, The Cardboard House is as "subversive now as when it was written: Adán's uncompromising poetic vision and the trueness and poetry of his voice constitute a heroic act against cultural colonialism."

    Obsessed with attaining aristocratic status—armed with incredible physical presence, indomitable ambition, and keen intelligence—she meets Fernando Fornarís, the man who will forever change her life. With a parcel of land given to her by her rich, white married lover, Isabel transforms herself into a hard-edged and merciless businesswoman—abandoning her own newborn son to become Puerto Rico's most feared and respected madam, a collector of society's secrets, a queen of the notorious brothel that emerges as the island's true political and economic heart.Set against the rich backdrop of the Caribbean and the United States during the tumultuous years of World War II, Mayra Santos-Febres's Our Lady of the Night is a breathtaking novel of passion, power, and the devastating price of achieving everything one wishes for.

    Taking an eclectic array of influences and personalities from modern history, he teases out events that at first glance seem random and insignificant and proceeds to weave them together masterfully, entertaining as he enlightens. Joseph Beuys, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Stanley Kubrick, Neil Armstrong, Wittgenstein, Glenn Miller and the Beatles; poets and authors, priests, astronauts and Russian sailors all make an appearance, and Sagasti finds common threads to bind their stories together. The fireflies themselves perhaps provide the key to understanding this book. They become a metaphor for the resistance of certain luminous moments, certain twinkling fragments of history, to the passing of time. They remind us that events do not always disappear neatly into the darkness, but rather remain, floating in the air, lighting up the night sky for years to come. Sagasti shows us that the present moment, like this novel, is a tapestry woven of a multiplicity of times.Using his unique, poetic and keenly observant style, Sagasti turns the accidents of history into a single, lyrical constellation, and for the reader it’s an extraordinary sight.

    Somerset Maugham led many lives, including that of a doctor in London's slums, a successful playwright and novelist, an agent for British Intelligence during World War I, and a world traveler. In 1917, he took the first of many voyages to the Pacific Islands and the Far East, where his keen sense of observation found inspiration for some of his finest writing.Rain and Other South Sea Stories features one of Maugham's most famous tales, concerning the clash between a missionary and a prostitute. "Rain" was adapted for the stage and filmed on three separate occasions, its leading character portrayed by Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth. This collection also includes "Macintosh," a psychological study of the competition between two officials; "The Fall of Edward Barnard," a tale of social rebellion that foreshadows The Razor's Edge; "The Pool," a portrait of a marriage between people from different cultures; and other compelling stories of life in the tropics.

    Intrigued, she begins to watch them. She imagines them as accomplices to an unknown crime, as troubled spinsters contemplating suicide, or as players in an affair with dark and mysterious consequences.Lange’s imaginative excesses and almost hallucinatory images make this uncanny exploration of desire, domestic space, voyeurism and female isolation a twentieth-century masterpiece. Too long viewed as Borges’s muse, Lange is today recognised in the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer and is here translated into English for the first time, to be read alongside Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras.