Download or read book The Catalans A Novel written by Patrick O'Brian and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2007-07-17 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Homage to Catalonia written by George Orwell and published by Prabhat Prakashan. This book was released on 2024-10-24 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Struggle for Catalonia written by Raphael Minder and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyses with rare impartiality what sets the Catalans apart from Spain, and how the separatist debate is playing out.
Download or read book The Revolt of the Catalans written by J. H. Elliott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-06-07 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Waltz written by Francesc Trabal and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book History of Catalonia and Its Implications for Contemporary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict written by Antonio Cortijo and published by . This book was released on 2020-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presents a detailed overview of the evolution of the Catalan identity and how Catalonia has been shaped by many geographic and cultural influences"--
Download or read book Death in Spring written by Mercè Rodoreda and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Authoring the Past written by Jaume Aurell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-03-21 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages. The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.
Download or read book The Catalan Poems written by Pere Gimferrer and published by Carcanet Press Ltd. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Barcelona written by Robert Hughes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1993-03-09 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A monumentally informed and irresistibly opinionated guide to the most un-Spanish city in Spain, from the bestselling author of The Fatal Shore. In these pages, Robert Hughes scrolls through Barcelona's often violent history; tells the stories of its kings, poets, magnates, and revolutionaries; and ushers readers through municipal landmarks that range from Antoni Gaudi's sublimely surreal cathedral to a postmodern restaurant with a glass-walled urinal. The result is a work filled with the attributes of Barcelona itself: proportion, humor, and seny—the Catalan word for triumphant common sense.
Download or read book Private Life written by Josep Maria de Sagarra and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-11-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Taste of Barcelona written by H. Rosi Song and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely associated with avant-garde gastronomy and lavish food markets, Barcelona has become a top destination for gourmands and chefs around the world, especially after the spectacular rise of chef Ferran Adrià of the famed elBulli, soon to be reborn as elBulli1846. Barcelona is a city that attracts millions of visitors in search of art and culinary experiences while cookery apprentices from around the world arrive looking to perfect their skills and expand their gastronomic horizon. The city offers an unequaled combination of restaurants, chefs, restauranteurs, media and local government initiatives to help those who arrive seeking an extraordinary culinary experience. But how has the city established itself as a global culinary referent while becoming synonymous with cutting-edge cuisine? This book narrates Barcelona’s urban and culinary development from the Middle Ages to the present, tracing the origins and the growth of the culinary prestige of this part of Catalonia. Barcelona has been a cosmopolitan center since the 1700s because of its location and busy port. The city has always been well supplied with food, and its residents built a strong culinary tradition enlivened by its contact with other cuisines and novel products afforded by its geographic location and the people who migrated to the area. With literature, painting, music and architecture, cooking has been a crucial activity in creating and maintaining a Catalan identity. Past, present and future visitors of the city will find a fascinating history of the unforgettable culinary importance of one of the most popular cities of Spain.
Download or read book The South written by Colm Toibin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly acclaimed novel from the author of Brooklyn and an “immensely gifted and accomplished writer” (The Washington Post), about an Irishwoman who creates a new life in post-war Spain. In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew. The South is a novel of classic themes—of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom—to which Colm Tóibín brings a new, passionate sensitivity.
Download or read book Homage to Barcelona written by Colm Tóibín and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colm Tóibín's Homage to Barcelona celebrates one of Europe’s greatest cities – a cosmopolitan hub of vibrant architecture, art, culture and nightlife. It moves from the story of the city’s founding and its huge expansion in the nineteenth century to the lives of Gaudí, Miró, Picasso, Casals and Dalí. It also explores the history of Catalan nationalism, the tragedy of the Civil War, the Franco years and the transition from dictatorship to democracy which Colm Tóibín witnessed in the 1970s. Written with deep knowledge and affection, Homage to Barcelona is a sensuous and beguiling portrait of a unique Mediterranean port and an adopted home.
Download or read book Uncertain Glory written by Joan Sales and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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' son on her own, letters from the front her only solace. With bombs falling as fast as the city's morale, she leaves to winter with Lluís' 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, old friend and traitor of easy conscience, a philosopher-cynic locked in an eternal struggle with himself. Joan Sales, a combatant in the 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 Dostoevsky and Stendhal, Uncertain Glory is a homegrown counterpart to classics such as Homage to Catalonia and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Download or read book Language the Novelist and National Identity in Post Franco Catalonia written by Kathryn Crameri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2000 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kathryn Crameri reveals some of the complex responses of writers and literary critics to the new possibilities for the expression of Catalan identities which resulted from Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy. The study begins by considering the cultural and political context of the Catalan novel from the 'Renaixenca' to the present day, and then offers a detailed analysis of novels by four very different writers - Montserrat Roig, Manuel de Pedrolo, Juan Marse (who writes in Spanish) and Biel Mesquida - all of whom seem to share an underlying thematic preoccupation with both individual and national 'transitions' and the intricate relationship between language and identity. These writers challenge institutionalised visions of the link between Catalanism, the Catalan language and Catalan literature, and offer a more pluralistic and personalised version of what it is to call oneself a Catalan.
Download or read book The Gray Notebook written by Josep Pla and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Josep Pla’s masterpiece, The Gray Notebook, is one of the most colorful and unusual works in modern literature. In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor. Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works. It is a beautiful, entrancing, delightful book—at once a distillation of the spirit of youth and the work of a lifetime.
