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Books Burn Badly
Originally published: London: Harvill Secker, 2010.
The Carpenter's Pencil
It is the summer of 1936, in the early months of the civil war that engulfed Spain. In a prison in the city of Santiago de Compostela, an artist sketches the Portico de la Gloria. He uses a carpenter's pencil. He replaces the faces of the prophets and elders with those of his Republican inmates.
Butterfly's Tongue
Butterfly's Tongue" tells of the friendship between a boy and an anarchist schoolmaster, born of their mutual interest in animal and insect life, and destroyed by the start of the Spanish Civil War. "A Saxophone in the Mist" and "Carmina" also tell of first experiences with the adult world.
In the Wilderness
A glorious cast of animals and birds, as well as humans, relate magical stories in this extraordinary novel. An old lady, Misia, tells how the 300 ravens of Xallas are the warrior- poets of the last king of Galicia. A priest, Don Xil, explains to a peasant girl, Rosa, that the beautifully carved women in the local church are not saints, but representations of the seven deadly sins. Manuel Rivas's story emerges like spirals of smoke, in a series of memorably poetic images. His characters have their roots deep in the traditions, legends, language and history of Galicia, Spain's most north- westerly province. With tremendous power of vision Rivas displays his strong sense of cultural identity through tales narrated with great tenderness and humour.
Vermeer's MilkmaidStories
"Manuel Rivas is "an author who knows how to introduce poetry not just into his sentences but into his way of looking at the world." Now, Rivas turns his poetic eye upon his native region with this collection of stories." "A traveling lingerie salesman is helped miraculously by a rock musician as he waits for his son who has run away; a love-addled bank robber botches a job; a sleepy village is abruptly transformed by the onset of the Spanish Civil War. The everyday lives of the memorable Galician characters may be desperately harsh and filled with pain and solitude, but their situations are always redeemed by humor and tenderness in this collection of sixteen short stories by prizewinning Spanish writer Manuel Rivas. Rivas draws on folktales, fantasy, and, most deeply, human psychology to create haunting tiny dramas. Deft and precise, these stories linger long after being read."--BOOK JACKET.
From Unknown to Unknown
This anthology in English, From Unknown to Unknown, gathers together eighty poems and is introduced by the Scottish writer John Burnside, who writes, 'Here is an essential poet whose work illuminates the world and the condition of those who live it.'
The Low Voices
The Low Voices is a novel about life, it is life itself telling stories, it is the memory of the quiet voices of the people I got to know. The Low Voices draws on a patchwork of memories from Rivas's early life under Franco. There's his beloved elder sister, Mar�a; his mother, the verbivore; his father, a construction worker with vertigo; and a supporting cast of local priests, chatty hairdressers, wolf hunters and monstrous carnival effigies. The book is full of wonderful personal stories, set against a background of the ravages of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath at home, and the wider world as Coca-Cola sets up a factory nearby and news comes in of men landing on the moon. A brilliant coming-of-age novel from one of Spain's greatest storytellers, The Low Voices is a humorous and philosophical take on memory, belonging, and the nature of storytelling itself.
The Last Days of Terranova
A far-reaching story of an outcast and his bookstore: a home to forbidden books, political dissidents, and cultural smugglers all brought to vivid poetic life “Rivas is a master… His pages bloom like flowers, swerving in unpredictable arcs toward a light-source that is constantly moving.” —Bookforum The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories. Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid. Like the bookstore itself, The Last Days of Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literary references, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life in Rivas’s vital prose.
The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories
This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present day. Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends old favourites and hidden gems - many of which have never before been translated into English - and introduces readers to surprising new voices as well as giants of Spanish literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazán and Leopoldo Alas, through Mercè Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Ana Maria Matute and Javier Marías. Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers.
Politics and Political Elites in Latin America
This book presents in-depth analyses of the data gathered for 26 years by the Political Elites of Latin America project (PELA), the most comprehensive database about the topic in the world. Since 1994, PELA has conducted around 9,000 personal interviews with representative samples of the Legislative Powers of 18 Latin American countries, generating a unique resource for the study of political elites in a comparative perspective. Now, this contributed volume brings together studies that dig into the data gathered by PELA to discuss important topics related to the challenges faced by representative democracy in Latin America. After an introductory chapter that presents the potential of the PEL...
