I plan to pick at this a little more later. My spanish isn't to the level yet where I can read entire paragraphs and only have to look up a word or two, so reading in the original spanish is still quite time consuming. Reading in the English is okay, but with the exception of the Gabriel Marquez story, none of them really grip me yet. For now, I'll stick to reading transliterations of Neruda until my vocabulario improves.

Like chips without salsa, this was never quite satisfying, I suspect because the collection was intended not to present great stories, but instead stories that have been translated, and might be accessible to the Spanish language student. So they were odd on their own, odd as a group, and I tried but bumbled through reading the supposedly easiest story in Spanish. After each odd story I would crave some insight, and turn to the introduction for clues. Nada. Nada, but a gloss of the briefest sort.

A very interesting and thought-provoking selection of stories, presented in side-by-side Spanish and English text. I am only beginning to learn to read Spanish from the original, and this has helped me immensely, both to immerse myself in the work of some of the Spanish-speaking authors, and to get supportfrom the English versionwhenever my still limited vocabulary was not quite adequate. My goal when I started to learn the language was to be able to read, one day, from the original text such works as A Hundred Years of Solitude or Al Laberinto de Soledad. There is still a long way for me until I get there, and I fully appreciate the beauty of the original writing, but with books like this one I am making one small step each time; every story, and every page becomes a small victory, which has been made possible by having access to the original text *and* a translated version at once.