Passed through Barcelona recently and took some time to get a little reading material, two from one of my favorite small presses, Paginas de Espuma. Both classics and new writers.
https://bythefirelight.com/2023/09/17/book-splurge-mexican-women-short-stories/
Capital de la gloria is the final installment in Juan Eduardo Zúñiga’s Madrid trilogy, a work that explores the Spanish Civil War in rich and darkly elegiac stories. Published in 2003, clos...
The Mexican author Socorro Venegas’ fine collection explores the transition to motherhood, the early stages of pregnancy through the first year or so, where doubts, uncertainty, and strictures ...
Andrés Neuman is many writers; novelist, poet, short story author, and through the range of his diverse works he has shown immense talent and versatility. I first came to his works via the short...
https://bythefirelight.com/2020/05/05/fracture-by-andres-neuman-a-review/
Mercé Rodoreda’s work is marked by a concise style infused with a deep attachment to the natural world, one that is both emotionless and yet full of beauty. Open Letter has published four of h...
https://bythefirelight.com/2020/04/11/garden-by-the-sea-by-merce-rodereda-a-review/
It is one of those fascinating experiences of reading that let one enter into old political arguments, wander through them as if in an attic, and find among the detritus of so much misplaced, or ...
https://bythefirelight.com/2020/04/04/damned-souls-by-dimiter-dimov-love-war-and-the-plague/
If the short story, in relation to the novel, is an underappreciated form, then flash fiction, or it’s better sounding name in Spanish, the Microrrelato, is even in an even worse state. There a...
https://bythefirelight.com/2020/03/07/la-guerra-the-war-by-ana-maria-shua-a-review/
La tierra será un paraíso (The Earth Will Be a Paradise) is the second book in Juan Eduardo Zúñiga’s Madrid trilogy, picking up a few years after the close of Largo noviembre de Madrid. It ...
For a country whose most famous literary work is a novel, Doña Perfecta has the appearance of an early novel, a novel whose shifts in style and the occasional lacuna in the plot, suggest a nasce...
https://bythefirelight.com/2019/09/11/dona-perfecta-by-benito-perez-galdos-a-review/
Thomas Boyd’s 1923 WWI novel is relatively forgotten work in the literature of the war. Although, F. Scott Fitzgerald called it a work of art in his review, it does not quite rise to that statu...
https://bythefirelight.com/2019/07/05/through-the-wheat-by-thomas-boyd-a-review/