Read Cuentos fatales in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Cuentos fatales by Leopoldo Lugones was first published in 1924. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy, horror and mystery and crime. It runs to about 26,300 words.

A pharaoh's curse. A perfume that kills. Five tales in which ancient mysteries reach Buenos Aires.

At the Plaza Hotel, the narrator — Lugones himself — meets Mr. Neale Skinner, a jovial Scottish engineer who was present when Tutankhamun's tomb was opened. His story of an alabaster vase and a strange perfume revives an old warning: never be the first to enter a royal tomb. In the sequel, "The Queen's Eyes", Neale falls under the spell of a mysterious beauty known as "the Egyptian of the Plaza".

The other tales range just as far: a scholar who uncovers the secret word of the medieval Order of Assassins, an old traveller who swears he once met the real Don Juan, and "Águeda", in which an 18th-century bandit hides on the haunted peak of Champaquí in the hills of Córdoba.

Published in 1924, Fatal Tales shows the great Argentine modernist Leopoldo Lugones at his most elegant and unsettling — a direct ancestor of Borges's fantastic fiction.

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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday Spanish feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.