Read Cuentos de Navidad y Reyes in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Cuentos de Navidad y Reyes by Emilia Pardo Bazán was first published in 1902. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked beginner and filed under children and historical fiction. It runs to about 54,900 words.

Snow, candlelight and miracles both great and small.

Emilia Pardo Bazán, one of the great masters of the Spanish short story, gathers here her tales for Christmas and Epiphany. Some are tender, some ironic, some quietly heartbreaking. In "The Pope's Christmas Eve", the marble Christ Child seems to come alive in a Roman church as the Pope prays; in "Peludo's Christmas", an old, mistreated donkey spends the holy night tied up in the rain outside a noisy tavern; and in "The Carpenter's Christmas Eve", an unemployed workman sits on a freezing staircase, unable to face his hungry family. The Three Kings appear too, lost on the plain when their guiding star suddenly goes out.

The volume also includes her "Tales of the Homeland" and "Ancient Tales", which travel from Spain's wounded pride after 1898 to legendary India.

Short, vivid and full of feeling, these stories are an ideal way into Pardo Bazán's world.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Spanish and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.