Spanish · Intermediate
Read Los desterrados in Spanishwith every sentence explained
English title: The Exiles and Other Stories
Horacio Quiroga · 1926
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Los desterrados by Horacio Quiroga was first published in 1926. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 27,400 words.
The jungle of Misiones, where people come to escape and rarely leave.
In these stories Horacio Quiroga returns to the red earth and great rivers of northeastern Argentina, the frontier where he himself lived for years. Here are eccentric settlers, stubborn inventors, failed businessmen and old pioneers, all of them exiles of one kind or another, battling heat, floods, drink and their own obsessions.
In The Return of Anaconda, the great serpent leads the animals of the jungle in a war to win back the river from humankind. In The Dead Man, a farmer who falls on his own machete lies in his banana grove and watches an ordinary morning go on without him. And in the title story, two ageing Brazilian pioneers long to see their homeland one last time.
The Exiles and Other Stories (1926) is Quiroga's mature masterpiece, and its tales are among the most anthologised in Latin American literature.
- Author
- Horacio Quiroga
- First published
- 1926
- Language
- Spanish
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 27,400 words
How it opens
Cuando Anaconda, en complicidad con los elementos nativos del trópico, meditó y planeó la reconquista del río, acababa de cumplir treinta años.
Era entonces una joven serpiente de diez metros, en la plenitud de su vigor. No había en su vasto campo de caza tigre o ciervo capaz de sobrellevar con aliento un abrazo suyo. Bajo la contracción de sus músculos toda vida se escurría, adelgazada hasta la muerte. Ante el balanceo de las pajas que delataban el paso del gran boa con hambre, el juncal, todo alrededor, empenachábase de altas orejas aterradas.
Reading Los desterrados in Passage
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.
