Read Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Cuentos de amor de locura y de muerte by Horacio Quiroga was first published in 1917. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked advanced and filed under horror.

Love that burns out, fevers no doctor can explain, and a jungle that never forgives a single mistake.

Horacio Quiroga, the Uruguayan master of the short story, spent years living in the subtropical forest of Misiones, in northern Argentina, and this 1917 collection carries its heat, its rivers and its sudden dangers. Its eighteen tales range from carnival romances to yerba plantations and lonely huts deep in the forest.

In "El almohadón de pluma", a young bride wastes away in a cold white house for no reason anyone can find. In "A la deriva", a man bitten by a snake pushes his canoe out onto the Paraná, racing the venom downstream. In "La gallina degollada", four neglected brothers and their little sister share a house where something terrible is waiting to happen.

Often compared to Poe, whom he admired, Quiroga writes with cool precision about obsession, illness and death. His stories are still read in schools across Latin America, and they still unsettle.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Spanish book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.