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Carmen Laforet (Barcelona 1921 - Madrid 2004) was one of Spain's most significant writers of the post-civil war period, but a primarily historical approach to reading her work may have distorted our understanding. In this book, Wells argues that the five major novels need to be read as a collective meditation on the subject of relief.
Carmen Laforet (Barcelona 1921 - Madrid 2004) was one of Spain's most significant writers of the post-civil war period. Her debut novel Nada (1945) won the first Premio Nadal and remains her best-known work of fiction, but a primarily historical approach to reading Nada may have distorted our understanding of Laforet's writing. Wells argues that Laforet's five major novels need to be read as a collective meditation on the subject of relief. Laforet's novelistic output is therefore considered within a much broader framework than hitherto conceived. Wells discusses Laforet's concern with the complexities of human psychology and the deeper philosophical issues that her novels address. Each novel constitutes an aesthetic response to different modes of psychological suffering pertinent not only to Laforet's life but to the human condition in general. Caragh Wells is senior lecturer in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses primarily on post-war Spanish and Catalan fiction with particular emphasis on women's writing, feminist theory, psychoanalysis and the emotions.
Eighteen-year old orphan Andrea moves to battle-scarred Barcelona to take up a scholarship at the university. But staying with relatives in their crumbling apartment, her dreams of independence are dashed among the eccentric collection of misfits who surround her, not least her uncle Roman. As Andrea's university friend, the affluent, elegant Ena, enters into a strange relationship with Roman, Andrea can't help but wonder what future lies ahead for her in such a bizarre and disturbing world. Translated by Edith Grossman 'One of the great classics of contemporary European literature' Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Take Six: Six Spanish Women Writers is an anthology of short stories by six outstanding Spanish women writers: Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), Carmen de Burgos (1867-1932), Carmen Laforet (1921-2004), Cristina Fernández Cubas (born 1945), Soledad Puértolas (born 1947) and Patricia Erlés (born 1972). The stories span over one hundred years, starting with the indomitable Emilia Pardo Bazán, whose casual and often humorous protrayal of brutal domestic violence set a paradigm for the writers who followed her to explore every aspect of the roles imposed on women by a male-dominated society, delving into subjects ranging from love and betrayal to bereavement, arson and murder, without losing touch with the humorous side of seemingly impossible situations. Take Six; Six Spanish Women Writers was shortlisted for the Spanish Translation Prize in 2023.
In recent years, much Spanish literary criticism has been characterized by debates about collective and historical memory, stemming from a national obsession with the past that has seen an explosion of novels and films about the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship. This growth of so-called memory studies in literary scholarship has focused on the representation of memory and trauma in contemporary narratives dealing with the Civil War and ensuing dictatorship. In contrast, the novel of the postwar period has received relatively little critical attention of late, despite the fact that memory and trauma also feature, in different ways and to varying degrees, in many works written during ...
A work of fantasy, I Who Have Never Known Men is the haunting and unforgettable account of a near future on a barren earth where women are kept in underground cages guarded by uniformed groups of men. It is narrated by the youngest of the women, the only one with no memory of what the world was like before the cages, who must teach herself, without books or sexual contact, the essential human emotions of longing, loving, learning, companionship, and dying. Part thriller, part mystery, I Who Have Never Known Men shows us the power of one person without memories to reinvent herself piece by piece, emotion by emotion, in the process teaching us much about what it means to be human.
Nothing in Elias' measured life, in his whole career as a teacher of literature, in his marriage to the 'indescribably beautiful' Eva, foreshadowed the events of that apparently ordinary day. He makes sure he has his headache pills and leaves for work as he has done every morning for the past twenty-five years. He is only too familiar with his pupils' hostile attitude both to his lectures and to himself, but today he feels their impatience, their oafishness, more painfully than ever before and, after their ritually dismissive and bored response to his passionate lecture on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, he reaches a point of crisis. Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.
A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—the ability to quote the Talmud, Hegel, and Lao-Tzu. In this “irresistibly eccentric romp,” the author Milan Kundera has called “our very best writer today” celebrates the power and the indestructibility of the written word (The New York Times Book Review).
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LIE WITH ME It is the summer of 1916 and, with German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, the sixteen-year-old son of a prestigious family, the tranquillity of the city sits at odds with the salons and soirees he attends. But, after an electrifying encounter with the enigmatic writer, Marcel P, draws Vincent’s desires out into the light, his ever-riskier liaisons with a young solider begin to shape Vincent’s future. Translated by Frank Wynne 'A short, bold and original novel which beautifully captures the romance and amorality of gilded youth' Independent Elegant novellas-in-translation, VINTAGE EDITIONS celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.