Uniquely precocious within the Hispanic fiction -published when author Ana Maria Matute was 22 years old- Los Abel reached the finals of the 1947 Nadal prize. It was positively received, due both to the prestige of the prize and the surprise created by the rising of this feminine youthful voice that continued the disruption created by Carmen Laforet's Nada. However the canonical critique proved unable to fully appreciate the originality of this novel that, baffling censors, trespassed the Spanish dictatorship moral order for women and set the Spanish novel within the trend of universal...

To Die in the USA portrays, not unlike Citizen Kane, the metaphorical death, and life of a Spanish exile. Set mainly in California and New York, but also in Spain, England, France, Venezuela, Colombia, and Chile, this work is a combination of fiction, history, and memoir. To Die in the USA is an antihero's existential odyssey from the Spanish Civil War to the Reagan Era, sometimes crude and cruel, but always tempered by a dose of black humor. This memoir is a work of self-fiction. Names have been changed, characters combined and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative recreation,...