The Catalans: A Novel

The Catalans: A Novel
Author: Patrick O'Brian
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2007-07-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0393329720

Alan Roig returns to Saint-Feliu to find his family in crisis. His dour cousin Xavier, mayor and most powerful citizen of the town, plans to marry the daughter of the local grocer. Unfortunately she does not return his affection, and instead falls in love with Alain.

Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Prabhat Prakashan
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2024-10-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Step into the heart of revolutionary Spain with George Orwell's powerful account, Homage to Catalonia. In this poignant narrative, Orwell recounts his firsthand experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War, offering a vivid and deeply personal perspective on the political and social upheaval of the time. Orwell’s writing brings to life the intense struggles, challenges, and betrayals he witnessed as he joined the militia in Catalonia. With sharp clarity, he paints a stark picture of the ideological divides that tore the country apart, and the complexities of war that blurred the lines between friend and foe.But here's the twist that will captivate you: What does Orwell’s experience reveal about the nature of truth, power, and the human spirit during times of war? Can we learn from the past to avoid repeating its mistakes? This extraordinary memoir offers a rare look into the realities of war, filled with unflinching honesty and a deep sense of humanism. Through Orwell’s eyes, the reader gains an intimate understanding of the personal costs of conflict and the difficult choices soldiers had to make. Are you ready to witness the raw, unfiltered truths of war as seen through the eyes of one of history's most influential writers?Dare to immerse yourself in the brutal honesty of Homage to Catalonia and experience a unique chapter of history that continues to resonate today. Purchase it now, and begin your journey through Orwell’s compelling narrative of war, ideology, and survival.

The Struggle for Catalonia

The Struggle for Catalonia
Author: Raphael Minder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2017
Genre: POLITICAL SCIENCE
ISBN: 1849048037

Analyses with rare impartiality what sets the Catalans apart from Spain, and how the separatist debate is playing out.

Private Life

Private Life
Author: Josep Maria de Sagarra
Publisher: Archipelago
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2015-11-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 091467126X

Private Life holds up a mirror to the moral corruption in the interstices of the Barcelona high society Sagarra was born into. Boudoirs of demimonde tramps, card games dilapidating the fortunes of milquetoast aristocrats - and how they scheme to conceal them - fading manors of selfish scions, and back rooms provided by social-climbing seamstresses are portrayed in vivid, sordid, and literary detail. The novel, practically a roman-à-clef for its contemporaries, was a scandal in 1932. The 1960's edition was bowdlerized by Franco's censors. Part Lampedusa, part Genet, this translation will bring an essential piece of 20th-century European literature to the English-speaking public.

Waltz

Waltz
Author: Francesc Trabal
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1564789853

An occasionally absurd comedy of indecision and indolence from a maverick early modern. First published in 1936, and considered one of the most innovative and significant novels written in Catalan, Waltz tells the tale of an idle, introspective, and somewhat oblivious young “man without qualities” as he stumbles through a milieu of civic upheaval and bourgeois tragedy as he waltzes from one prospective bride to another, never willing to compromise his ideals, and so never quite becoming an adult. With one foot in the romanticism of Goethe or Kleist, and another in the wildly differing takes on the modern novel provided by Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, respectively, Waltz is an occasionally absurd comedy of indecision and indolence structured in imitation of the dance from which it takes its title.

The Catalan Poems

The Catalan Poems
Author: Pere Gimferrer
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2019-04-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1784107689

Longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award 2020 Spain's greatest living poet, Pere Gimferrer (b.1945) has written more than thirty books spanning verse, fiction, essay, and criticism. His earliest writings appeared in Spanish. In 1970 he began publishing in Catalan, and has alternated between the two languages since (with occasional forays into French and Italian). The present collection, the first book-length publication of Gimferrer's Catalan poetry in English, brings together work from all phases of his career. His poetry is a marvel of syncretism: Billie Holiday, the medieval polymath Ramon Llull, Ezra Pound, and the artist Tàpies all appear in his pages. His style draws equally on modernism, on Galician-Portuguese love lyrics, on Góngora and on the Valencian metaphysical poet Ausiàs March. Rounding out the volume is a selection from the Dietari, an artistic diary that outlines his poetics and his sense of the artist's vocation through a series of meditations on Casanova, Octavio Paz and others.

The Revolt of the Catalans

The Revolt of the Catalans
Author: J. H. Elliott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 652
Release: 1984-06-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521278904

The revolution of Catalonia in 1640 was a signal event in seventeenth-century Europe. Its causes and antecedents - essential for an understanding of the revolution itelf - form the basis of Professor Elliott's study of the Spanish monarchy at this time. They throw remarkable light on the whole question of the decline of Spain in the seventeenth century from its position of pre-eminence in Europe. From the fierce suppression of Catalan bandits by their Castilian overlords during the second decade of the century, Professor Elliott traces the gradual deterioration of relations between the principality of Catalonia and the government in Madrid. He shows how Olivares, the favourite and chief minister of Philip IV, attempted to use Catalan resources to fight Spain's foreign wars, and how the growing tension led ultimately to a revolution, which he suggests played a crucial part in Spain's decline. Professor Elliott's story is almost entirely based on previously unknown documents found in the Spanish national and local archives. These sources enabled him to write the first full-scale treatment of Olivares and his policies. While exciting as a story in its own right, it also stands as a case-history of the perennial struggle between regional liberties and the claims of central governments.

Death in Spring

Death in Spring
Author: Mercè Rodoreda
Publisher: Open Letter Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2009
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1934824119

Merce Rodoreda depicts the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town-burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood-through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate.

Uncertain Glory

Uncertain Glory
Author: Joan Sales
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-10-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1681371812

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF 2017 A classic Catalan work about love, family, and class during the Spanish Civil war. Spain, 1937. Posted to the Aragonese front, Lieutenant Lluís Ruscalleda eschews the drunken antics of his comrades and goes in search of intrigue. But the lady of Castel de Olivo—a beautiful widow with a shadowy past—puts a high price on her affections. In Barcelona, Trini Milmany struggles to raise Lluís’s son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city’s morale, she leaves to spend the winter with Lluís’s brigade on a quiet section of the line. But even on “dead” fronts the guns do not stay silent for long. Trini’s decision will put her family’s fate in the hands of Juli Soleràs, an old friend and a traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, distilled his experiences into a timeless story of thwarted love, lost youth, and crushed illusions. A thrilling epic that has drawn comparison with the work of Dostoyevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.