One of THE 10 MUST-READ CYCLING BOOKS OF 2014 according to the influential Peloton magazine. This is the story of Luis Ocana, the champion cyclist whose entire career constantly veered between heroism and tragedy, always missing out the middle way. Born into abject poverty during Spain's 'years of hunger' and brought up in France, throughout his adult life he suffered from the effects of his childhood malnutrition and the perpetual question of self-identity - the common lot of the exile - Spanish or French, or neither one nor the other? Enigmatic and contradictory, Ocana was driven by a fierce pride, and an all-or-nothing scorn for caution and careful calculation which made him one of the most dramatically exciting riders ever.This is a biography that has been a long time in the making. Carlos Arribas, cycling correspondent of the newspaper El Pais, and Spain's foremost cycling author, has spent years compiling the material and admits that, even as a child, he was affected by Ocana's repeated misfortunes.What he has written is more than a conventional biography. He defines it as a 'fictionalised life story', or a 'biographical novel'.All the duly documented facts are there, but to that solid skeleton has been added the flesh and blood of imagined (but totally plausible) conversations, meetings and encounters. These are not mere decoration; they serve perfectly to recreate the emotions and recollections of those who knew him, encountered him, loved him, or coped with him. It also provides a compelling entry into exploring the complex personality of Ocana himself."If I was going to write one story about cycling it would have to be that of Ocana. He was the cyclist who made us fall in love with cycling, who made us sense the truth of this sport: love, happiness and tragedy." Carlos Arribas

Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth offers ecocritical and ecopoetic readings that focus on multispecies dwellings of enchantment and reenchant our rapport with the more-than-human world. It sheds light on the marvelous entanglements between humans and other life forms coexisting with us-entanglements that, when fully perceived, call onto humans to shift perspectives on both the causes and solutions to current ecological crises. Working against the disenchantment of humans' relationships with and perceptions of the world entailed by a modern ontology, this book illustrates the power of ecopoetics to attune humans to the vibrant matter both within and outside of us. Braiding indigenous with non-indigenous worldviews, this book tackles ecopoetics emerging from varying locations in the world. It underscores the postmodernist, remythologizing processes going on in many ecopoetic texts, via magical realist modes and mythopoeia.

Pedro Delgado's 13-year racing career spanned one of cycling's golden decades. Riding against Hinault and Fignon in their prime in the early 1980s, then later against Roche and LeMond, through to mentoring Indurain in the 1990s, he took part in the Tour de France and in one of the other grand tours in every year but his first and last. His final haul of one Tour and two Vuelta victories perhaps does not do justice to his talent, but then he was a rider whose defeats were often every bit as memorable, and every bit as spectacular, as his victories, and they too could be accompanied by controversy. An innate climber, he learned how to time trial, but it was that natural inclination to attack whenever the gradient steepened, whether wisely or impulsively, that would move spectators to tears - sometimes of pure joy; sometimes of bitter disappointment. But in the end he was always capable of a smile, because he knew better than most how to take those 'two imposters of triumph and disaster' in his stride. More than a cycling biography, this book gives a rare and often amusing insight into the inner world of the professional peloton in that era - life in the team hotel; the obsessions about diet and health; the eccentricities and foibles of both the riders and their directors; as well as the loyalties and feuds provoked by this, the hardest of sports.