One of the core authors of the '60s boom in Latin American fiction, Julio Cortazar made a contribution of international importance to the development of the short story as a literary form. This collection spans his writing career and includes La Noche Boca Arriba and Final del Juego (1956), Las Babas del Diablo (1959), La Isla a Mediodia (1966), Recortes de Prensa and Queremos Tanto a Glenda (1981) and Botella al Mar (1982).
Of the seven stories, some are famous examples of his contribution to the genre of 'fantastic' literature, while others demonstrate his social and political concerns....

The second of Lorca's trilogy of rural dramas, Yerma, is a blend of contrasting moods through which Lorca charts the increasingly destructive obsession of a childless young country wife, and probes the darker zones of human fears and desires. The play's rich mode of expression - a combination of verbal, visual and auditory images and rhythms - is also geared to celebrating sexual attraction and fertility, creation and procreation.
Through his characterization of the play's central figure, Lorca raises the question of women's social status - a controversial question both then and now, and...

This tale of a slave's unrequited love for the woman who owns him is set in nineteenth-century colonial Cuba and was the only feminist-abolitionist novel published during the century in Spain or its colonies. This unique text raises important issues concerning power, race, gender and class in colonial societies, colonial and post-colonial subjectivity and identities, feminist appropriations of the abolitionist agenda, human rights discourse, and literary and philosophical issues associated with enlightenment thought. This new annotated critical edition is the first to provide the original...

Alfredo Bryce Echenique is one of the most widely-read and most widely translated Latin American authors of recent decades, yet this is the first critical edition that makes his work available to students of Hispanic literatures in the English-speaking world. Combining humour and informal language to explore adolescence in middle-class Peru, this edition provides ready points of engagement for young (and not-so-young) adults. The stories and main themes are explained and analysed through a critical introduction, comprehensive notes and vocabulary prepared by one of the leading international...

El Caballero de Olmedo is a history play, a retelling of a folk talk, a celebrated piece of Golden Age drama, and also an intense mediation upon the power of desire, the deceits of eroticism and literary convention, the injustice of a world obsessed with appearance, and the tragic potential inherent in the courting of beautiful women. The introduction sets this play within the context of Baroque eroticism and sexual mores as well as dramatic practice. The text is presented with glosses to words unfamiliar to undergraduate students; the notes comprise summaries of acts and scenes from a...

Pablo Neruda's Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (1924) is the most widely read and best loved book of poetry ever written in Spanish. Its verses can be recited by heart by millions of Latin Americans from every background and walk of life, and it has become almost a bible for young lovers.
Yet despite, or perhaps because of this immense popular success, it has received scant attention from scholars, often being studied out of context and in relatively superficial fashion. This new critical edition - the first to include critical notes in English - argues that the book...

If one had to identify one central, defining text from modern Mexican culture, it would be Octavio Pazs famous essay, El laberinto de la soledad. This fully annotated edition includes the complete text in Spanish (with the author's final revisions), and notes and additional material in English. The editor's introduction contextualizes the essay and discusses central features: autobiographical and textual origins, intellectual sources, reception and canonization, generic ambiguity, structure, and governing symbols. The intellectual sources identified range from Marx, Nietzsche and Freud to the...

This poem-by-poem guide to Lorca's Romancero gitano was prompted by the need for some form of guidance to the overwhelming amount of critical material published on the book, the relative neglect or misunderstanding of certain poems and a concern to counter a recent tendency to eccentric interpretation.
Herbert Ramsden's comprehensive collection of commentaries will be useful both for students and teachers and for the Lorca specialist. With each poem the author offers a brief introduction to relevant background material, a comprehensive commentary, a brief indication of interpretations...

Lorca is one of the outstanding poets of Spanish literature, and apart perhaps from his trilogy of stage tragedies, "Romancero gitano" is his most celebrated work: innovative, sophisticated, difficult and uniquely popular. Partly, no doubt, it is the appeal of his gypsies, childlike and magical, oppressed by the world around; partly too, the work's elemental concerns: machismo, honor, sex, betrayal, revenge, bloodshed, death; partly also, the many echoes of Andalusian popular culture: horsemen and smugglers, fiestas and local saints, legends and superstitions, ballads and deep song. By its...

"equiem per un campesino espanol" was first published under the title Mosen Millan in Coleccion Aquelarre, Mexico, 1953. The present text follows the first Spanish edition published by Destino, Barcelona, 1974, which bears a few minor variants, mainly in paragraph structure. It has been reprinted a number of times and translated into many languages and is one of the most widely read Spanish texts in the 20th century. This edition is aimed primarily at sixth-formers and university undergraduates and the introduction and notes have been compiled in the light of recent socio-politial topic-based...