Poems are in Spanish, and in English translation.

Having pursued a conventional enough path through school and university, Jason Webster was all set to enter the world of academe as a profession. But when his aloof Florentine girlfriend of some years dumped him unceremoniously, he found himself at a crossroads. Abandoning the world of libraries and the future he had always imagined for himself, he headed off instead for Spain in search of duende, the intense emotional state - part ecstasy, part desperation - so intrinsic to flamenco. Duende is an account of his years spent in Spain feeding his obsessive interest in flamenco: he subjects himself to the tyranny of his guitar teacher, practising for hours on end until his fingers bleed; he becomes involved in a passionate affair with Lola, a flamenco dancer (and older woman) married to the gun-toting Vicente, only to flee Alicante in fear of his life; in Madrid, he falls in with Gypsies and meets the imperious Jesús. Joining their dislocated, cocaine-fuelled world, stealing cars by night and sleeping away the days in tawdry rooms, he finds himself spiralling self-destructively downwards. It is only when he arrives in Granada bruised and battered, after two years total immersion in the flamenco lifestyle that he is able to put his obsession into context. In the tradition of Laurie Lee's classic As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Duende charts a young man's emotional coming of age and offers real insight into the passionate essence of flamenco.

The award-winning second collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.

This fascinating literary work explores the influence of Andalusia's ancient culture and civilization on the works of Ernest Hemingway and Federico Garcia Lorca. Although born on two different continents, these artists both were rooted in the blood and sand of the bullring and the culture of death, which made life that much more rich. They were both poets, and both men were musicians as evidenced by the musicality of the rhythms of their work. This study explores the cultural and historical influence of Andalusia on the poetry of Federico García Lorca and the prose of Ernest Hemingway, particularly the effects of the region's culture of life and death in their writing. This aspect of Spanish tradition found its greatest voice in bullfighting (toreo), pure gypsy flamenco song, and the creative concept of duende. Even though Lorca and Hemingway were born worlds apart, their works are steeped in a civilization thousands of years old that was molded and shaped by numerous people groups, including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Iberians, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors, Berber Muslims, and European Catholics. By examining the works of these two men immersed in the rich heritage of Andalusia as expressed during the early twentieth century, readers can more fully appreciate Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises and Lorca's poem Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. They are masterpieces-one of prose, the other of poetry-created by two great authors who influenced and changed the writing styles of those who followed them.

Here in the authorized translation by James Graham-Luján and Richard L. O'Connell, with an illuminating biographical introduction by the poet's brother, Francisco García Lorca, are three tragic dramas by the great modern Spanish poet and playwright which have caught the imagination and won the critical acclaim of the literate world.

This first English-language edition of Federico Garcia Lorca's Selected Letters presents an intimate autobiographical record of the Spanish poet from the age of twenty to a month before his death at the hands of Franco's forces in 1936. "I was born for my friends," Lorca wrote to Melchor Fernández Almagro in 1926, and these letters reveal the personality his friends found so magical. ("A happiness, a brilliance..." Pablo Neruda called him.) Lorca was by turns sympathetic, generous, demanding, whimsical, insecure, and always lyrical. Over the nineteen years covered in this selection, he maintained a correspondence with his closest friends, particularly his childhood companion Melchor Fernández Almagro and his fellow poet Jorge Guillén, and wrote in concentrated bursts to many others. He could be playful with Salvador Dali's younger sister Ana Maria; deferential to composer Manuel de Falla; lively and descriptive with his family; and exasperating to Barcelona critic Sebastian Gasch as he poured out literary plans and solicited favors, ever impassioned but good-natured. With their frequent enclosures of poems and scenes from plays, the letters also chronicle Lorca's growth as an artist, from self-doubting romantic dilettante to confident, internationally respected playwright and poet. Begun at Columbia University under the aegis of Lorca's brother, Francisco Garcia Lorca, the translation and selection of these letters has been made by David Gershator, poet, teacher, and co-founder of the Downtown Poets Co-op. Dr. Gershator has also provided an informative biographical introduction.

Memoir by the poet's brother.--Misha Schutt.

Federico Garcia Lorca called The Public "the best thing I've written for the theater." Yet, he acknowledged, "this is for the theater years from now." Now, half a century later, The Public and another of Lorca's most daring works, Play without a Title, are available in English translation for the first time. Surrealism, folk theater, poetry, vivid costumes, black humor--in the The Public, dramatic traditions are ransacked to develop themes as timely in the 1980s as they were taboo when Lorca was writing: if Romeo were a man of thirty and Juliet a boy of fifteen, would their passion be any less authentic? No, says a young observer of the play within the play, "I who climb the mountain twice each day and, when I finish studying, tend an enormous herd of bulls that I've got to struggle with and overpower at every instant, I don't have time to think about whether Juliet's a man or a woman or a child, but only to observe that I like her with such a joyous desire." In both The Public and Play without a Title, the player himself is of as much consequence as the role he plays. The fierce, stark Play without a Title, with its cast of Author, Prompter, Stagehand in the wings, and hecklers in the gallery, clearly heralds developments in today's avant-garde theater. It also reflects the violence of the times in which it was written. As Carlos Bauer notes in his introduction, neither of the plays in this volume was complete in 1936, when Lorca was assassinated by Franco's forces. Still, both have here the unity and grace of finished tours de force.

In his four last plays (Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, Dona Rosita the Spinster) Federico Garc ́ia Lorca offered his disturbed and disturbing personal vision to Spanish audiences of the 1930s---unready, as he thought them, for the sexual frankness and surreal expression of his more experimental work. The authentic sense of danger of Lorca's theatre is finely conveyed here in John Edmunds's fluent and rhythmic new translations that lend themselves admirably to performance.