This book begins with easy stories, mostly in present tense. It progresses to more difficult stories. The stories are by Latino authors, so you have the additional bonus of Latino culture with the stories. The back of the book gives brief information about the authors. It includes exercises, some to be answered orally and others written, and a Spanish glossary. It's a good tool to have in your "bag of tricks" for learning and improving your Spanish.

Not quite as simple as I'd anticipated before purchase. If you are a beginner this would be a good book to help practise pronounciation - if you have someone around to correct you. As an intermediate learner this book is quite challenging especially since you translate the Spanish 'literally' and the English version is a proper translation, so after that initial shock it's quite good reading. However, you also have to get over the idiomatic expressions. The stories are quite good otherwise and make a great read in English if the Spanish is too difficult.

ýýste es un encantador leýdo! Presenta espaýol en un ambiente contextually rico.
This is a delightful read! Presents spanish in a contextually rich environment.

The stories in this compilation are all very good, but aren't fantastic enough to make one happily reread them years hence with as much enthusiasm as those in the first penguin parallel volume. I will never be enthused enough to try to "hear the Spanish in my head" with relatively trite stories like Eva's Indifference" and "A literary tea party" as I might with any story in the first volume.

The spanish to english diction quickly gets very difficult unless one might have a strong liguistical background and/or a wild talent for math or chess. There are many obscure words (ie:individualizar) so a good chunk of knowledge is necessary to jump over specific sort of words (well, I tried) if one doesn't want to use a dictionary. The quantity of strange regional words immediately dispels the nonsense that 'students at all levels' can use the dual page format to some avail - pure nonsense: Beginning students shouldn't be as stupid as I was in concerning themselves over the varieties of words for bird excrement across central america (specific words a peruvian maid or columbian doctor might utter under their breath every couple decades are in the thousands throughout the three penguin volumes). I can't even find some of the words in a medium-sized yet all spanish dictionary(Diccionario escolar santillana de la lengua espanola) in this book.At times I don't get the impression I am learning very much and prefer simply not bothering with the english page for a while and slowly read with a large spanish to english dictionary. The idea of casually using a spanish verb to meet an english equivalent full of prepositions on the opposite page just doesn't seem very practical; increasingly practical seems to be using the english page as a sort of vague but not entirely innefectual little helper in the form of a series of footnotes or whathaveyou.

At times this volume is a linguistical freak-show: anyone who can even mildly descipher a story like the Syllabus in Spanish simply won't have time for his eyes to stretch out to his mother language across sentences with clauses stretched out so lengthily. Though the footnotes are helpful and at times invaluable, what with all the cerebral connect-the syntactical-spanish-to-english-dot-work going on, they should BE ON THE SAME PAGE.
All in all, though, I think the stories are too colorful and exciting to pass up for anyone who wants too combine them with language-learning.