Bøger i Spanish Literature Series serien

From the author of the highly acclaimed Four by Four and Among the Hedges comes a collection of unsettling, captivating stories.The eleven stories in this collection approach themes of childhood and adolescence, guilt and redemption, power and freedom. There are children who resist authority and experience the process of growing up with shock, and loneliness; alienated young girls whose rebellion lies under the surface-subterranean, furious and impotent; people who are tormented-or not-by regret and doubt, addicted to feelings of culpability; men who take advantage of women and adults who exercise power over children with a disturbing degree of control; kids abandoned by their parents; the suicide of the elderly and the young; lives that hide crimes-both real and imagined. Eschewing cosmopolitanism in favor of the micro-world of her characters, Mesa depicts a reality that is messy and disturbing, on even the smallest scale of an individual life, a single family.

Exiled in Tangiers, cut off from home and country, the narrator of Count Julian rants against the homeland he was forced to leave: Spain. The second novel in Juan Goytisolo's trilogy (including Marks of Identity and Juan the Landless), this story of an exiled Spaniard confronts all of Goytisolo's own worst fears about fascist Spain.

Four pairs of stories-four "double rooms"-sit side by side in the latest work of fiction by one of Spain's most compelling writers. Double Room is a subtle meditation on the bonds between parents and children, the burdens of illness and grief, and the places we make our home.

A young lawyer sets out on a mission to recapture the promise of his youth. His attempt leaves him stranded between a past he no longer recognizes and a life that's no longer his-and he soon begins to suspect that the surest path to happiness lies in simply giving up. A moving novel about defeat, memory, and the seductive prospect of losing it all.

In Exiled from Almost Everywhere, Juan Goytisolo's perverse mutant protagonist-the Parisian "e;Monster of Le Sentier"e;-is blown up by an extremist bomber and finds himself in the cyberspace of the Thereafter with an infinite collection of computer monitors. His curiosity piqued, he uses the screens at hand to explore the multiple ways war and terrorism are hyped in the Hereafter of his old life where he once happily cruised bathrooms and accosted children. Ricocheting from life to death and back again, meeting various colorful demagogues along the way-the imam "e;Alice,"e; a pedophile Monsignor, and a Rastafarian rabbi-our "e;Monster"e; revisits seedy democracies that are a welter of shopping-cities and righteous violence voted in by an eternally duped citizenry and defended by the infamous erogenous bomb. At once fantastical and cruelly real, Exiled from Almost Everywhere hurtles the reader through our troubled times in a Swiftian series of grisly cartoon screenshots.

In the late '60s, Julian Rios began work on what would have been his very first novel, but fearing that it wouldn't pass the stringent Spanish censorship under Franco, decided not to submit the completed book to publishers. Soon distracted by what would be his magnum opus-the Larva series-the manuscript was set aside and forgotten, until the author found and dusted it off almost fifty years later. Quite unlike his later postmodernist work, the short and bitter Procession of Shadows is filled with stories of love, war, and vengeance, focusing on the tiny, remote village of Tamoga-a place where vendettas are passed down from generation to generation, and where violence has left its traces in every corner. A Winesburg, Ohio for the end times, Procession of Shadows shows us a very different side of the usually playful Rios: dark, direct, and pitiless.

The Irish Sea meditation on the paradox of nostalgia, which always seems to pine for what never was. A fevered search for order through writing, of truth through literature, of the nodal point where life and literature intersect. A strange personal gallery curated by a razor-sharp reader and his other, unknown self.

A mysterious character from the city arrives at a peaceful country village, attracting the interest of Josu, a young man. Julio Jose Ordovas's skillfull narrative tells of an unlikely friendship between two rebellious characters at different times in their lives. His debut novel promises an unrestrained, uncensored narration, leaving nothing untold.

Recounting: Antagony, Book I surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The novel follows the youth and education of Raul Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism.

An exile returns to Spain from France to find that he is repelled by the fascism of Franco's Spain and drawn to the world of Muslim culture. In Marks of Identity, Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, speaks for a generation of Spaniards who were small children during the Spanish Civil War, grew up under a stifling dictatorship, and, in many cases, emigrated in desperation from their dying country. Upon his return, the narrator confronts the most controversial political, religious, social, and sexual issues of our time with ferocious energy and elegant prose. Torn between the Islamic and European worlds around him, he finds both ultimately unsatisfactory. In the end, only displacement survives.