La obra nos introduce al mundo de la alegría que llega a la euforia y de la depresión que la conduce a la tristeza más profunda, a través de la intensa vida de sus personajes, así Dante, Justina, Artemisa, Sabina, entre otros, nos muestran el lado más intenso del suicidio, la adicción, la prostitución, la depresión y el amor. Estos cuentos, a través de pasajes de luz y oscuridad nos lleva de la mano emocional de la razón arrebatada y burlona, entre la dulce melancolía cruzamos el filo de lo inimaginable de la cordura y entre lágrimas y risas cruzamos a su mundo imaginario. Dulce desesperanza acompasa cada movimiento y con figuras sutiles crea un espectro de amor engarzado a su corazón. Entristecida nos muestra su lado imaginario y destrozado donde las emociones enfatizadas sienten y sufren por este sentimiento plasmado. Lectura ampliamente recomendable para los lectores ávidos de incursionar un mundo ajeno y propio; en el que todos nos reconocemos un poco o mucho.

As portrayed in Homer's Odyssey, Penelope - wife of Odysseus and cousin of the beautiful Helen of Troy - has become a symbol of wifely duty and devotion, enduring twenty years of waiting when her husband goes to fight in the Trojan War. As she fends off the attentions of a hundred greedy suitors, travelling minstrels regale her with news of Odysseus' epic adventures around the Mediterranean - slaying monsters and grappling with amorous goddesses. When Odysseus finally comes home, he kills her suitors and then, in an act that served as little more than a footnote in Homer's original story, inexplicably hangs Penelope's twelve maids. Now, Penelope and her chorus of wronged maids tell their side of the story in a new stage version by Margaret Atwood, adapted from her own wry, witty and wise novel. The Penelopiad premiered with the Royal Shakespeare Company in association with Canada's National Arts Centre at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in July 2007.

Many language books are boring—this one is not. Written by a native English speaker who learned Spanish the hard way—by trying to talk to Spanish-speaking people—it offers English speakers with a basic knowledge of Spanish hundreds of tips for using the language more fluently and colloquially, with fewer obvious "gringo" errors. Writing with humor, common sense, and a minimum of jargon, Joseph Keenan covers everything from pronunciation, verb usage, and common grammatical mistakes to the subtleties of addressing other people, "trickster" words that look alike in both languages, inadvertent obscenities, and intentional swearing. He guides readers through the set phrases and idiomatic expressions that pepper the native speaker's conversation and provides a valuable introduction to the most widely used Spanish slang. With this book, both students in school and adult learners who never want to see another classroom can rapidly improve their speaking ability. Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish will be an essential aid in passing the supreme language test-communicating fluently with native speakers.

Cecilia Valdés is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde's novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same father. Eventually Cecilia gives in to Leonardo's advances; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. When Leonardo, who gets bored with Cecilia after a while, agrees to marry a white upper class woman, Cecilia vows revenge. A mulatto friend and suitor of hers kills Leonardo, and Cecilia is thrown into prison as an accessory to the crime. For the contemporary reader Helen Lane's masterful translation of Cecilia Valdés opens a new window into the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba and the Caribbean. There are the elite social circles of European and New World Whites, the rich culture of the free people of color, the class to which Cecilia herself belonged, and then the slaves, divided among themselves between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in the New World, and those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the rich people in Havana. Cecilia Valdés thus presents a vast portrait of sexual, social, and racial oppression, and the lived experience of Spanish colonialism in Cuba.

A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish has been fully revised and updated, including over 500 new entries, making it an invaluable resource for students of Spanish. Based on a new web-based corpus containing more than 2 billion words collected from 21 Spanish-speaking countries, the second edition of A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish provides the most expansive and up-to-date guidelines on Spanish vocabulary. Each entry is accompanied with an illustrative example and full English translation. The Dictionary provides a rich resource for language teaching and curriculum design, while a separate CD version provides the full text in a tab-delimited format ideally suited for use by corpus and computational linguistics. With entries arranged both by frequency and alphabetically, A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish enables students of all levels to get the most out of their study of vocabulary in an engaging and efficient way.

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award