lapoubelle; I had no idea, either. It’s just great. The more I read in the blog’s archives, the better it becomes.
. . . they should say more, maybe offer a few links . . .
The Russian texts are easily available online, gratis, and perhaps some mp3s too–many Russians have no qualms about putting such things online. The French versions would be much tougher to find, at no cost, I think. The translations from English into French one sees are usually quickly removed; those from Russian may not be so well protected, but I’ve never looked, since the originals are available.
Looking at the US and Spanish sites of Amazon I didn’t see any audiobooks available from Marquez. Meanwhile, a search of worldcat.org suggests that audiobooks of a couple of his novels were released on cassette in the 80s.
Perhaps of interest to iTunes users, Apple has some kind of partnership with Audible that enables US customers to buy foreign language audiobooks, including French and Spanish.* Two of the Spanish titles I looked for also appear on Audible’s US site, but the French titles are not listed for sale there. Searching for “texte intégral” on iTunes brings up a seemingly interminable list of results, while “texto completo” generates a more manageable 3 or 4 pages.
*I’ve noticed German, Italian, and Danish as well.
I’m a little late here, but in addition to Marquez what other authors would you like to see? Or specifically what titles?
I work with a recording studio in Peru for other projects and have considered starting a small Spanish audiobook business before, but with so many choices it’s important to know which are the highest in demand.
elchilango, a book I’d like to listen to is La Sombra del Viento, by Carlos Zafón. And there’s always translations of Jules Verne–just kidding, but he’s always a favorite of mine, he’s still fairly popular, and the works are in the public domain. My wife is a fan (reading in English, as I do so far, mostly) of Isabel Allende, who seems very popular. At this point for me, Spanish audio would be for learning purposes, and I obviously don’t know much about Spanish literature. However one of my daughters-in-law is a native speaker of Spanish. I’ll ask when I see her next, which should be within the next few weeks, and let you know.
I would like to listen to all the works I list below, but I asterisk my ‘super’ favorites.
Novels
Azuela, Mariano. Los de abajo.
Esquivel, Laura. Como agua para chocolate.
*Marsé, Juan. Si te dicen que caí.
Pérez-Reverte, Arturo. La reina del sur.
*Puig, Manuel. Boquitas pintadas.
Vargas Llosa, Mario. La tía Julia y el escribidor.
Zafón, Carlos. La Sombra del Viento.
Poetry
*Darío, Ruben. Any and all of his poems.
Neruda, Pablo. Any and all of his ‘nonpolitical’ poems.
Short Stories (I do not know most of the Spanish titles)
Allende, Isabel. Cuentos de Eva Luna.
Borges, Jorge Luís. Any but especially ‘The Aleph.’
Cortázar, Julio. Any.
Donoso, José. ‘Ana María’
Hernández, Filisberto. ‘The Balcony’
Lispector, Carlos. ‘Love’
Onetti, Juan Carlos. ‘Hell Most Feared’
Piñera, Virgilio. ‘The One Who Came to Save Me’
Rulfo, Juan. ‘Lovina’
There are more short stories than I have the patience to type. Starting with Borges, the short stories in this list are from The Vintage Book of Latin-American Short Stories, edited by Carlos Fuentes and Julio Ortega. The collection contains two dozen or so stories, and every one of them is excellent.
I would say any contemporary novels or short stories by internationally known authors starting from Llosa and Borges and going anywhere. There is NOTHING out there that is legal with high-quality audio. Such books would have a huge market in Spanish speaking countries and of course would be invaluable to learners like us since we would have the transcript already available and one could easily devise supplemental materials such as vocabulary and grammer lessons.
Just like those who posted right before me, I’d like to see a website selling audiobooks (possibly downloadable ones) of contemporary authors, e.g. Zafón, Falcones, Allende, and so on, but I still haven’t found one, with the exception of those mentioned in this thread, whose offer is very limited anyway.
How about good podcasts out of Mexico and South America, not “how to learn Spanish” stuff, but interesting podcasts that native speakers would listen to?
Hi,
I upload my own audiobooks to my Youtube’s channel. I have recorded some long novels, some poems and some traditional tales too. I am from Spain.
From the video description, you can download every audiobook in .mp3 file and the text in .pdf (some times it isn´t exactly the same, because of the translation from Spanish)
