LOVE STORIES
by Emilia Pardo Bazán
Passion, betrayal, obsession, and the quiet cruelties of the human heart - collected here are forty-three short tales from one of Spain's most fearless literary voices. In Love Stories, Emilia Pardo Bazán turns her sharp naturalist eye on the many faces of love: tender and destructive, sacred and absurd, tragic and darkly comic. A jilted bride discovers the truth behind a torn piece of lace. A jealous husband plots a chilling revenge disguised as accident. A princess is cured of a mysterious illness by nothing more than the sight of a beloved face. A gypsy's curse comes true in the most unexpected way.
Written at the height of the Spanish Naturalist movement, these stories combine unflinching psychological realism with flashes of irony, wit, and even the fantastic. Spanning aristocratic salons, rural villages, convents, and battlefields, Pardo Bazán captures the full sweep of 19th-century Spanish society - and the universal human dramas that unfold within it. Now translated into English for a new generation of readers, this collection offers a vivid, sometimes unsettling, always compelling portrait of love in all its forms.
About the Author
Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) was a Spanish novelist, journalist, essayist, and literary critic, widely regarded as one of the most important writers of 19th-century Spain and a pioneering voice for women in Spanish letters. Born into an aristocratic family in A Coruña, Galicia, she received an unusually thorough education for a woman of her time and went on to become a leading figure in the introduction of French Naturalism to Spanish literature. Her novels Los pazos de Ulloa (The House of Ulloa) and La madre naturaleza are considered masterpieces of the genre. A prolific short-story writer, Pardo Bazán published hundreds of tales across her career, many of them - like those gathered in Cuentos de amor - exploring love, class, and the often-hidden inner lives of women. She was also an outspoken advocate for women's education and rights, and in 1906 became the first woman to chair a section of Spain's Ateneo de Madrid. Her sharp, unsentimental prose and keen social observation continue to influence Spanish literature to this day.
About Rediscovered Women in Translation
For most of literary history, the women who shaped the Spanish and Latin American imagination were read in their own time and then quietly let go of, allowed to fall out of print, out of the anthologies, and out of the conversation. Rediscovered Women in Translation exists to bring them back.
Each book in this series restores a writer whose work was overlooked, suppressed, or simply forgotten, and offers it to English-language readers, many of them for the first time, in a fresh and faithful translation. These are novels, stories, essays, and poems that deserved to endure: bold, strange, funny, unsettling, and fully alive on the page. Their authors wrote across centuries and borders, from the convents of colonial Mexico to the cafés of mid-century Buenos Aires and the literary salons of Madrid. What unites them is not their gender alone, but the quality of work that history failed to keep in print.
We begin in Spain and Latin America, where so many essential voices still wait to be heard in English, and we intend to follow the thread of rediscovery wherever it leads. A book does not stop mattering because the world stopped paying attention. Our purpose is to make sure these are read again.
Media Fanega Editions
