“Locos: a comedy of gestures” by Felipe Alfau “Felipe Alfau was born in Barcelona in 1902. During the First World War he emigrated to the United States, where he studied music and was briefly a music critic for La Prensa, a New York newspaper in Spanish. Determined to adopt English as a literary language, he finished Locos in 1928, but
“Don Clorato de Potasa” by Edgar Neville “His novel Don Clorato de Potasa (1929) falls within the confluence of avant-garde and humorous narration and is dominated by the anti-traditionalism and anti-realism typical of Neville's first literary stage. His characters are non-conformist and maladjusted beings, characterized by
“Bebela” by Agustín García Calvo “narrative poem that portrays the figure of a woman —recognizable, by the way, with names and surnames— very close to the author.” Extracted from magazines.ucm.es See also: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agust%C3%ADn_Garc%C3%ADa_Calvo http://www.editoriallucina.es/cms/ http://www.elpais .com/articulo/cultura/Agustin/Garcia/Calvo/lengua/manda/nadie/elpepucul/20100223elpepucul_2/Tes The selected titles are a sample of the materials currently on loan from the International Institute Library collections.
“A heart so white” by Javier Marías “This celebrated European best-seller opens with an unexplained suicide in Madrid forty years before the narrator is born, when the aunt he´ll never meet leaves the lunch table and shoots herself in the chest. The next chapter jumps to his honeymoon from him, as he overhears lovers plotting murder, perhaps,
“Barojiana” by Juan Benet “With the title of Barojiana, Juan Benet wrote years ago a beautiful text in which he collected his memories of the gathering that Don Pío Baroja used to have in the afternoons at his house on Ruiz de Alarcón street in Madrid . He recounted, among other things, that one day in
“What am I going to tell you” by Martín Casariego “In the frenetic and crazy Madrid of recent years, it can happen that a 23-year-old boy meets a 17-year-old girl and falls madly in love with her. Just as it can happen that suddenly she leaves him, perhaps because he is unable to
“Letter to the mother and complete stories” by Esther Tusquets “In the seventies Esther Tusquets brought to the Spanish narrative a different feminine vision of the world, more in keeping with the times. To the cycle of stories entitled Seven looks at the same landscape and to the compilation The lunatic girl and other stories we now add
“The sky of Madrid” by Julio Llamazares “Generational Chronicle, The sky of Madrid is also a reflection on the search for happiness, which for the protagonist-narrator and his friends symbolize the sky of the city and the one painted on the roof of the bar where they meet every night. Julio Llamazares
“The meridian devil” by Luis Mateo Díez “This volume is made up of three short novels (The meridian devil, The shadow of Anubis and Lucerna Guesthouse) apparently independent but linked by a mythical-realistic space that Luis Mateo Díez has been forging throughout of his novels and narratives. All the characters are broken, fragmented by a
“El don de Vorace” by Félix Francisco Casanova “Félix Francisco Casanova wrote El don de Vorace in 44 days. It was the summer of 1974 and he was 17 years old. A literary vomit that, in a state of grace -and almost in a trance-, recounted the infernal spiral of Bernardo Vorace, a man in free fall after believing himself to be immortal