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Rating: 
Summary: encantador leÃdo
Review: ¡Éste es un encantador leÃdo! Presenta español en un ambiente contextually rico.
This is a delightful read! Presents spanish in a contextually rich environment.
Rating:
Summary: Good to help you secure your learning
Review: Definitely not a beginners book. Probably comes in at the intermediate level & above. Assumes you know the complete verb system...the stories throw pretty much everything at you in terms of sentence construction. The more advanced you are, the less you need to depend on the English translation and just read the stories in Spanish, which even by themselves are treasures (I. Allende, G. Garcia Marquez, C. Fuentes among the estimable authors included).The translations are a joy to read, because you notice right away that there's not this word-for-word transliteration that you get with many attempts at parallel texts. The translators (each credited in their own right) really try to bring across in English the feeling and emotion that the writer intended when they penned the original Spanish. It's eye-opening. On top of that, the book's editor John R. King has added about 20 - 30 or so footnotes per story that really take your understanding to a new level. A great example: in the first story, he adds a footnote to denote when the two characters in the story slip from using formal verb construction into informal. It would have slid right by me, had it not been for the footnote. And it does mark a definite change in the direction of the story. Really good stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Good to help you secure your learning
Review: Definitely not a beginners book. Probably comes in at the intermediate level & above. Assumes you know the complete verb system...the stories throw pretty much everything at you in terms of sentence construction. The more advanced you are, the less you need to depend on the English translation and just read the stories in Spanish, which even by themselves are treasures (I. Allende, G. Garcia Marquez, C. Fuentes among the estimable authors included). The translations are a joy to read, because you notice right away that there's not this word-for-word transliteration that you get with many attempts at parallel texts. The translators (each credited in their own right) really try to bring across in English the feeling and emotion that the writer intended when they penned the original Spanish. It's eye-opening. On top of that, the book's editor John R. King has added about 20 - 30 or so footnotes per story that really take your understanding to a new level. A great example: in the first story, he adds a footnote to denote when the two characters in the story slip from using formal verb construction into informal. It would have slid right by me, had it not been for the footnote. And it does mark a definite change in the direction of the story. Really good stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: Good literature and great linguistics
Review: Short Stories in Spanish improves ones language skills through enjoyable stories and excellent linguistic explanations. These stories come from many different spanish speaking countries, which allows the student to be exposed to different style and slang. Not only are the stories translated correctly, but certain words, names, and phases are explained in depth relating to culture or history. Furthermore, the difficulty of this book is from advanced beginner to expert.
Rating:
Summary: diverse and good stories
Review: The stories in this compilation are all very good, but aren't fantastic enough to make one happily reread them years hence with as much enthusiasm as those in the first penguin parallel volume. I will never be enthused enough to try to "hear the Spanish in my head" with relatively trite stories like Eva's Indifference" and "A literary tea party" as I might with any story in the first volume. The spanish to english diction quickly gets very difficult unless one might have a strong liguistical background and/or a wild talent for math or chess. There are many obscure words (ie:individualizar) so a good chunk of knowledge is necessary to jump over specific sort of words (well, I tried) if one doesn't want to use a dictionary. The quantity of strange regional words immediately dispels the nonsense that 'students at all levels' can use the dual page format to some avail - pure nonsense: Beginning students shouldn't be as stupid as I was in concerning themselves over the varieties of words for bird excrement across central america (specific words a peruvian maid or columbian doctor might utter under their breath every couple decades are in the thousands throughout the three penguin volumes). I can't even find some of the words in a medium-sized yet all spanish dictionary(Diccionario escolar santillana de la lengua espanola) in this book.At times I don't get the impression I am learning very much and prefer simply not bothering with the english page for a while and slowly read with a large spanish to english dictionary. The idea of casually using a spanish verb to meet an english equivalent full of prepositions on the opposite page just doesn't seem very practical; increasingly practical seems to be using the english page as a sort of vague but not entirely innefectual little helper in the form of a series of footnotes or whathaveyou. At times this volume is a linguistical freak-show: anyone who can even mildly descipher a story like the Syllabus in Spanish simply won't have time for his eyes to stretch out to his mother language across sentences with clauses stretched out so lengthily. Though the footnotes are helpful and at times invaluable, what with all the cerebral connect-the syntactical-spanish-to-english-dot-work going on, they should BE ON THE SAME PAGE.
All in all, though, I think the stories are too colorful and exciting to pass up for anyone who wants too combine them with language-learning.
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