This page is designed to guide you as you begin to extend the linguistic and cultural knowledge you’ve gained so far in Spanish, by suggesting a range of literary texts from a range of eras and from across the Spanish-speaking world. The list is not in any way intended to be prescriptive, and there are many other interesting texts and authors out there for you to discover. The texts below have been selected by the tutors at Oxford on the basis that they are relatively short, and should be accessible to you with a good dictionary at your side! It is challenging to pick up a novel or other work in a foreign language, and you should be patient when you begin. Don’t look up every word you don’t know (try to work some of them out according to the context), but be prepared to look things up when you need to for the sake of comprehension. There are some good online dictionaries, but you might also find it worthwhile to invest in both a monolingual and bilingual dictionary for your bookshelf. There are also some titles relating to history and language that will be essential to any further study in Spanish, and some web links to cultural sites.
This page is a work in progress and will be updated periodically, so please do check it from time to time. At the bottom of the page you will find a section called ‘Today I am reading…’, with details of a work that somebody in the sub-faculty of Spanish is particularly enjoying and would like to recommend.