Lazarillo de Tormes and The Swindler

Resumen del libro

Being a thief isn't just a job, it's a liberal profession'

These Spanish picaresque novels focus on the adventures of two unlikely heroes delinquent pícaros living by their wits among corrupt priests and prostitutes, beggars and idle gentlemen, thieves, tricksters and murderers. The tales are sharply critical of the Church and conventions of nobility, and grotesquely exaggerated depictions of the criminal underworld. The anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) provided a literary model for Cervantes in Don Quixote and describes the ingenious ruses employed by a boy from Salamanca to outwit a succession of disreputable masters. Francisco de Quevedo's The Swindler (1626) is a comic, yet brutal and sordid, account of a servant who wants to become a gentleman but ends up as a cardsharp and a common criminal.

For this edition Michael Alpert has updated his translation from the original Penguin Classics edition of 1969, with a new map, chronology of events, notes and bibliography. His revised introduction examines the historical, economic and social context of the picaresque novel, with a detailed discussion of each story.

Biografía del autor

(Madrid, 1935) es uno de los grandes dibujantes españoles de inspiración literaria. Nombrado miembro de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando en 1998, desde muy joven demostró su enorme talento creativo y con solo 22 años obtuvo la Tercera Medalla de Pintura y Dibujo en la Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes. Becado por la Academia de España en Roma en 1964, desde entonces ha publicado varios libros de arte, ha sido profesor visitante en universidades como la japonesa de Nara y ha ilustrado libros como el poemario de Luis Alberto de Cuenca La mujer y el vampiro (2010), Tatuaje, de Junichiro Tanizaki (2010), Amor y gimnasia, de Edmondo de Amicis (2011) y Gitanjali, del Premio Nobel Rabindranath Tagore (2014) y Pinocho (2014), de Carlo Collodi.