These Spanish picaresque novels focus on the adventures of two unlikely heroes

delinquent picaros living by their wits among corrupt priests and prostitutes, beggars and idle gentleman, thieves, tricksters and murderers. The tales are sharply critical of the Church and the conventions of nobility, and contain grotesquely exaggerated depictions of the criminal underworld. Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), published anonymously, provided a literary model for Cervantes in Don Quixote and describes the ingenious ruses employed by a boy from Salamanca to outwit a succession of disreputable masters. Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler (1626) is a comic, yet brutal and sordid account of a servant who wants to become a gentleman but ends up as a cardsharp and a common criminal. For this edition Michael Alpert has updated his translation from the original Penguin Classics edition, with a new map, chronology of events, notes and further reading.