Cuentos

This volume brings together three of the short story collections Thomas Hardy published during his lifetime—Tales of Wessex, Little Ironies of Life, and A Changed Man and Other Stories. Many of them are previously unpublished in Spanish, and for the first time together, they feature translations by Catalina Martínez Muñoz, Javier Marías, Carlos Mayor, José Luis López Muñoz, and Marta Salís. The Tales of Thomas Hardy are a true compendium of narrative mastery, character development, inventiveness, and plot handling. Inspired mostly by oral tradition, they include historical legends, stories with fantastical elements —some bordering on the Gothic genre and others on fairy tales— tales of wit and cunning in the Boccaccian style, and dramatic stories of displacement and the yearning for knowledge. His heroes sometimes belong to the Romantic tradition—fugitives, smugglers, hussars, absentees who reappear, melancholic knights, repentant spouses—and his heroines struggle between mechanically following the path that "has been allotted to them" and "thinking that the path one did not take would have been the best." Couples who will never be together, due to the whims of character and fate, star in tragic anecdotes or Shakespearean-Pearean comedic entanglements full of amusing misunderstandings and impersonations.