Even more popular in their day than Don Quixote, Cervantes's Exemplary Stories (1613) surprise, challenge and delight. Ranging from the picaresque to the satirical, Cervantes's Exemplary Stories defy the conventions of heroic chivalric literature through a combination of comic irony, moral ambiguity, realism, and sheer mirth. With acute narrative skill and deft characterisation, drawing on colloquial language and farce, Cervantes creates a tension between the everyday and the literary, the plausible and the improbable. While encouraging us to reach our own moral conclusions, he also persuades us to accept the coincidental and the incredible: two boys indulge their life of crime at a time of public prayer; a young nobleman undergoes a change of identity at the behest of not a princess but a mere gipsy girl, and, most fantastically, talking dogs philosophize in a ward full of syphilitics. By placing the extraordinary within the contexts of the ordinary, the Exemplary Stories chart new novelistic territory and demonstrate Cervantes at his most imaginative and innovative. This new translation captures the full vigour of Cervantes's wit and makes available two rarely printed tales, `The Illustrious Kitchen Maid' and `The Power of Blood'.

"It was the Exemplary Novels, published three years before his death ... that established Cervantes' literary reputation among the intellectuals of his time. These picaresque stories ring with racy idiom and peasant humor, and with explicit characterizations that show how well he knew the speech and folkways and psychology of the common people. Among the Exemplary Novels presented here are three of his most famous ones: The Deceitful Marriage, a cynical tale of Spanish domestic life, merciless in its realism, pungent in its humor; The Little Gypsy, a love story of a high-spirited girl whose haunting counterpart has reappeared in the works of Goethe and Victor Hugo; and The Dogs' Colloquy, judged by many critics to be the greatest short story ever written."--Page 4 of cover.

Originally published in four separate volumes, this publication sees all 12 Novelas Ejemplares as a single volume for the first time in English. Each story has an individual introduction, the original Spanish text with facing English translation and notes.

Contains Don Quixote, in Samuel Putnam's acclaimed translation, substantially complete, with editorial summaries of the omitted passages; two 'Exemplary Novels, 'Rinconete and Cortadillo' and 'Man of Glass'; and 'Foot in the Stirrup,' Cervantes's extraordinary farewell to life from The Troubles of Persiles and Sigismunda.

At the height of María de Zayas’s popularity in the mid-eighteenth century, the number of editions in print of her work was exceeded only by the novels of Cervantes. But by the end of the nineteenth century, Zayas had been excluded from the Spanish literary canon because of her gender and the sociopolitical changes that swept Spain and Europe. Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion gathers a representative sample of seven stories, which features Zayas’s signature topics—gender equality and domestic violence—written in an impassioned tone overlaid with conservative Counter-Reformation ideology. This edition updates the scholarship since the most recent English translations, with a new introduction to Zayas’s entire body of stories, and restores Zayas’s author’s note and prologue, omitted from previous English-language editions. Tracing her slow but steady progress from notions of ideal love to love’s treachery, Exemplary Tales of Love and Tales of Disillusion will restore Zayas to her rightful place in modern letters.

This book sets the Novelas ejemplares in the mainstream of Christian Humanism and shows that their narrative forms manifest the breadth of the Christian Humanist vision as much as does the more overtly revolutionary Don Quixote. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Dialogue of the Dogsis an inspired work of psychological observation by the master of the picaresque novel. In it, Cervantes displays all the clarity and warmth that marks the rich prose of Don Quixote.Given the gift of speech for a day, two dogs set about satirizing humans, their supposed superiors. In an exchange reminiscent of the ancient Greek Dialogues, they recount their experiences under their various masters. But whether butcher, constable, merchant, or gypsy, each is decried as corrupt to the core. Through the scathing Berganza and the critical Scipio, Cervantes delivers an ingenious critique of the morality of 16th-century Spain, and a timeless and telling portrayal of the heart of man. Author of the universally known Don Quixote,Miguel de Cervantes is Spain's greatest writer.