Eight Novellas

Book excerpt: The eight novellas collected in this book display the humor, exuberant spirit, love of language, and insight of the Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a central figure in the European and Latin American avant-garde, and a key contributor of Anglo-American imagism to Spanish literature. Father of the prose and poetry of the «Generation of '27», Gómez de la Serna was admired by T.S. Eliot, Macedonio Fernández, Oliverio Girondo, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Alfonso Reyes, and was a source of inspiration for Borges, García Márquez, Cortázar, and Pizarnik. These novellas, with their humorous and witty exaggerations of everyday human foibles, their simple story lines and often-surprising endings, are presented here in the original Spanish with a clear English translation on facing pages. This book will be useful in intermediate and advanced Spanish classes and in translation courses.