"An elegant, precise, and accessible modern-English rendering of the two best examples of the early modern picaresque genre: the paradigmatic Lazarillo de Tormes and Quevedo's mordant El Buscón. Frye's translations are triumphant, capturing the cadence of popular early modern speech while remaining faithful to the original texts; his notes illuminate the diverse contexts in which the texts were written. Frye gives careful attention throughout to the historical background that propelled these two parallel but different monuments of Golden Age Spanish literature." --Teofilo Ruiz, UCLA