Spanish Literature

In the late '60s, Julián Ríos 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 Ríos: dark, direct, and pitiless.

At a New Year's Eve party, a dead woman turns up alive again, after passing through a mysterious post-mortem way station located on another planet, and much to the disbelief of her old flame, who interprets the night's events with the help of his reading of Kafka. A priest is sent by the Vatican to investigate a strange development in the American cattle market: a breed of cows identical in all physical respects to human women. A man leaves his wife and flees to the north of Spain, where he meets a sickly woman in an empty café, introduces himself as Jorge Walser, and makes plans with her to disappear. Aboard a trans-atlantic cruise, a door-to-door vacuum salesman bumps into a woman who appears to be Natassja Kinski, and they swap tall tales as the ship floats them asymptotically toward world's end. Christ turns out to be a girl who fronts a punk band. The words of such writers as Beckett, Walser, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Bolaño, Kafka, Blanchot, and Borges are characters in themselves. The Irish Sea is a novel masquerading as a book of short stories. A 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.

When his marriage and career fall apart, a young lawyer sets out on a desperate mission to recapture hen 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. Losing Is What Matters is a moving, tragicomic novel about defeat, memory, and the seductive prospect of losing it all.

Antagony surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The work, originally published as a tetralogy and now collected into one volume, follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. Its potent drama plays out through Goytisolo's crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one's artistic vocation. Alternately modern and historical, Antagony displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.

The protagonist-narrator of The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part returns to find an answer the question: how does a writer remember? In particular, how does a he-a writer who no longer writes but can't stop reading and rereading himself-remember. The Writer takes us hurtling through the refracted funhouse of his recursive and referential-maniac mind with a host of debut performances and redux appearances: the howling ghost of electricity and the defective Mr. Trip; the wuthering and heightened Penelope and her lost son; 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner; the absent Pertusato, Nicolasito and the omnipresent IKEA; the dead Colma, the deceased ZZYZX, the departed Nothing, and the immortal Sad Songs; the irrealist Vladimir Nabokov and the surrealist Karmas; Wish You Were Here playing on (im)mobil(izing) phones and Dracula being invited in; the disturbed Uncle Hey Walrus and parents who are models but not at all model parents; The Beatles and The Beatles; a nonexistent country of origin and a city in flames; an unforgettable night that wants nothing more than to be rewritten; and so many more accelerated particles and freewheeling fragments and interlinked cells searching for a storyline to give them some structure, some meaning. With mordant wit, capacious intelligence, and vertiginous prose, The Remembered Part closes Rodrigo Fresán's sprawling tryptic novel. A novel that has at its heart the three component parts of literary creation, the engines that drive the writing of fictional lives and the narration of real works of art: invention, dream, and memory. It is a masterpiece by one of contemporary literature's most daring and innovative writers.

A mother kills her twins. Another woman, the narrator of this story, is about to give birth. She is a writer, and she realizes that she knows the woman who committed the infanticide. An obsession is born. She takes an extended leave, not for child-rearing, but to write. To research and write about the hidden truth behind the crime. Mothers don't write. Mothers give life. How could a woman be capable of neglecting her children? How could she kill them? Is motherhood a prison? Complete with elements of a traditional thriller, this a groundbreaking novel in which the chronicle and the essay converge. Katixa Agirre reflects on the relationship between motherhood and creativity, in dialogue with writers such as Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Mothers Don't plumbs the depths of childhood and the lack of protection children face before the law. The result is a disturbing, original novel in which the author does not offer answers, but plants contradictions and discoveries.

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. A publisher wonders about the voices that haunt her; a scriptwriter receives an unexpected gift; a dinner party is shaken by a mysterious guest; a father seeks to atone for his son's crimes. Ranging from Madrid to Milwaukee, and from prose fiction to drama to essay, the chapters of this "narrative installation" echo one another, revealing a carefully layered composition of humor and foreboding. 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.

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.

Sonia meets Knut in an online literary forum and begins a long-distance relationship with him that gradually turns to obsession. Though Sonia needs to create distance when Knut becomes too absorbing, she also yearns for a less predictable existence. Alternately attracted to and repulsed by Knut, Sonia begins a secret double life of theft and betrayal in which she will ultimately be trapped for years.

Hailed by Spain's Revista Quimera as one of the top ten Spanish-language novels of the decade, alongside Bolaño's 2666, Vila-Matas's Bartleby & Co., and Marías's Your Face Tomorrow, the many layers of The No World Concerto center around an old screenwriter, holed up in a shabby hotel in order to write a screenplay about his lover, a young piano prodigy who wants in turn to give up music and become a writer, and believes she may be in contact with creatures from another dimension. Shifting effortlessly between realities, The No World Concerto is a delightful and prismatic novel, and the first of A. G. Porta's books to appear in English, finally joining those of his early writing partner Roberto Bolaño.