The author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it. Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart—or in our own.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed. For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best. “With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English. A humane and moving book."—New Republic “Excellent and involving . . . What makes [Hochschild’s] book so intimate and moving is its human scale.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
Americans have fallen in love with Spanish food in recent years, and no one has done more to play matchmaker than the award-winning chef José Andrés. In this irresistible companion volume to his public television show Made in Spain, José reminds us—in the most alluring and delicious way—that the food of his native Spain is as varied and inventive as any of the world’s great cuisines. To prove it, José takes us on a flavorful tour of his beloved homeland, from Andalucía to Aragón. Along the way, he shares recipes that reflect not just local traditions but also the heart and soul of Spain’s distinctive cooking. In the Basque Country, we discover great fish dishes and the haute cuisine of some of the finest restaurants in the world. In Cantabria, famous for its dairy products, we find wonderful artisanal cheeses. In Valencia, we learn why the secret to unforgettable paella is all in the rice. And in Castilla La Mancha, José shows us the land of the great Don Quixote, where a magical flower produces precious saffron. The dishes of Made in Spain show the diversity of Spanish cooking today as it is prepared in homes and restaurants from north to south—from casual soups and sandwiches to soul-warming dishes of long-simmered beans and artfully composed salads. Many dishes showcase the fine Spanish products that are now widely available across America. Many more are prepared with the regular ingredients available in any good supermarket. With more than one hundred simple, straightforward recipes that beautifully capture the flavors and essence of Spanish cooking, Made in Spain is an indispensable addition to any cookbook collection.
Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and political forces that transformed Spain’s diverse peoples and polities into a unified nation. Antonio Feros traces evolving ideas of Spanish nationhood and Spanishness in the discourses of educated elites, who debated whether the union of Spain’s kingdoms created a single fatherland (patria) or whether Spain remained a dynastic monarchy comprised of separate nations. If a unified Spain was emerging, was it a pluralistic nation, or did “Spain” represent the imposition of the dominant Castilian culture over the rest? The presence of large communities of individuals with Muslim and Jewish ancestors and the colonization of the New World brought issues of race to the fore as well. A nascent civic concept of Spanish identity clashed with a racialist understanding that Spaniards were necessarily of pure blood and “white,” unlike converted Jews and Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans. Gradually Spaniards settled the most intractable of these disputes. By the time the liberal Constitution of Cádiz (1812) was ratified, consensus held that almost all people born in Spain’s territories, whatever their ethnicity, were Spanish.
A San Francisco Chronicle and NPR Best Book of the Year The author of the acclaimed memoir The Suicide Index returns with a virtuosic collection of stories, each a stirring parable of the power of love and the impossibility of understanding it. Spanning centuries and continents, from eighteenth-century Vienna to contemporary America, Joan Wickersham shows, with uncanny exactitude, how we never really know what’s in someone else’s heart—or in our own.
For an entire generation, the Spanish Civil War was the ultimate test of commitment and courage as Communism and Fascism faced each other across Europe. Nobody wrote more vividly or more painfully about this than Orwell (1903-1950), as he came face to face with the reality of the civil war in Catalonia. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things- Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.
Long viewed as Spain's "most Moorish city," Granada is now home to a growing Muslim population of Moroccan migrants and European converts to Islam. Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar examines how various residents of Granada mobilize historical narratives about the city's Muslim past in order to navigate tensions surrounding contemporary ethnic and religious pluralism. Focusing particular attention on the gendered, racial, and political dimensions of this new multiculturalism, Rogozen-Soltar explores how Muslim-themed tourism and Islamic cultural institutions coexist with anti-Muslim sentiments.
Ernest Hemingway famously called Spain "the country that I loved more than any other except my own," and his forty-year love affair with it provided an inspiration and setting for major works from each decade of his career: The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Dangerous Summer, and The Garden of Eden; his only full-length play, The Fifth Column; the Civil War documentary The Spanish Earth; and some of his finest short fiction, including "Hills Like White Elephants" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." In Hemingway's Spain, Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino collect thirteen penetrating and innovative essays by scholars of different nationalities, generations, and perspectives who explore Hemingway's writing about Spain and his relationship to Spanish culture and ask us in a myriad of ways to rethink how Hemingway imagined Spain--whether through a modernist mythologization of the Spanish soil, his fascination with the bullfight, his interrogation of the relationship between travel and tourism, his involvement with Spanish politics, his dialog with Spanish writers, or his appreciation of the subtleties of Spanish values. In addition to fresh critical responses to some of Hemingway's most famous novels and stories, a particular strength of Hemingway's Spain is its consideration of neglected works, such as Hemingway's Spanish Civil War stories and The Dangerous Summer. The collection is noteworthy for its attention to how Hemingway's post-World War II fiction revisits and reimagines his earlier Spanish works, and it brings new light both to Hemingway's Spanish Civil War politics and his reception in Spain during the Franco years. Hemingway's lifelong engagement with Spain is central to under�standing and appreciating his work, and Hemingway's Spain is an indispensable exploration of Hemingway's home away from home.
Henry Kamen's work re-creates the dazzling world of Imperial Spain, from the capture of Moorish Granada and Columbus's first voyage in 1492, to its expansion into Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, ad the opening up of the frontiers in Texas and California in the eighteenth century. Drawing on the accounts of those who witnessed these great events, whether Aztec chroniclers, Italian explorers or Filipino sultans, Kamen balances the wonders of the Empire (the first sight of the Pacific, the astonishing voyages of the Manila galleons) with the horrors - the slavery, disease, terror and waste of human life it entailed.
