To read Iman (1930) by Ramon J. Sender is to sail into a vertiginous trip within the darkest aspects of the human being. A man, a soldier striving to survive along endless days and nights in a desert landscape, without further protection besides his scarce strengths, surrounded by death, violence, horror. A shockingly compelling novel, both harsh and beautiful, written in a prose that attains lyricism heights seldom seen in war novels, that has the power to immerse the reader into the nameless world that lies beyond the madness frontier. With this, his first novel Ramon J. Sender (Spain 1901- USA 1982) immediately became one of the most important XX Century Spanish novelists. Iman, a novel full of aggravation provoked by the senseless powers that ruled Spain, sympathetic towards those who died, accuser against those who took advantage of the young lives of the Spanish people, played a key role in the Spanish monarchy fall and the subsequent arrival of the Republic. But its literary and universal claim values make it stand as the chronicle of the unleashed barbarism inherent to each and every war. Almost a century after the narrated episodes it still makes for a reading that leaves no room for indifference. In this edition the introductory study by Borja Rodriguez Gutierrez and the footnotes allow the modern reader to grasp and enjoy the Sender text in its full masterpiece magnitude.

The Spanish romantic short story is the great unknown of one of the most intriguing Spanish literary trends. Though being the forerunner to the brilliant Spanish short story period (Becquer, Valera, Alarcon, etc.), it has stood widely ignored. Evil and benevolent kings, disgraced lovers, noble heroes and damned villains, Jews, sorcerers, loyal servants, ghosts, magnanimous and malevolent Moors, rude countrymen and noble peasants, noble middle aged knights that fall for languid damsels or for graceful passionate young women of dark skin and darker eyes, and knights that act as utmost Spanish chivalry examples. Medieval castles, dark woods, villages of the Mancha, Galicia, Andalousie and Aragon. The Prado with its chariots and strollers parade. All the above can be found in the Spanish romantic short stories, of which these thirteen are a great sample of this most multiform and varied trend of the first half of the nineteenth Century. Throughout this anthology prof. Borja Rodriguez Gutierrez answers some basic questions: what constitutes a short story? What does romantic mean? When and how was the Spanish romanticism movement? Where there romantic short stories written in Spain? The analysis of these questions lead to the unearthing of thousands of stories waiting in the remote and less consulted rows of revision libraries.

Bodas de Sangre meant the definitive success -both of public and critique- for playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. As a playwright he succeeded at staging the great issues of his poetry, his symbols, images and ideas, while creating a dramatic performance that captivated the audiences of Spain, Europe and the Americas. With this play Lorca achieved his most cherished ambition: to reach the masses, to impassionate with his plays vast and differently cultured audiences of diverse origins, nationalities and customs, without debasing himself to -commercial theater- commonplaces and vulgarity. Lorca succeeded with a different and suggestive play, deeply rooted in the classic tragedy concept and staged in modern times. A modern tragedy in Garcia Lorca's Andalusia, that in a similar way to Garcia Marquez's Macondo, or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, becomes a particular space, part myth part poetry, where reality intertwines with artistic creation. In this edition Borja Rodriguez Gutierrez analyzes in depth the tragic dimension of this Garcia Lorca play, where nature, blood, knives, death, the moon, and the overwhelming force of love, drag the main characters down into their unavoidable, tragic, destiny.

As he wrote La casa de Bernarda Alba, Federico Garcia Lorca explained: "drama is poetry that escapes the book and becomes human. And as it is being made it talks and shouts, cries and despairs." Lorca saw in theatre the most perfect means to reach people's souls, more immediate and effective than poetry, and he kindled this possibility even amidst difficult times. Lorca is, mainly, a poet, and as so his plays possess great visual as well as linguistic virtue. The last of the rural tragedies -Bernarda Alba was preceded by Bodas de sangre (1933) and Yerma (1934)- was finished in June 1936. It was meant to open in Buenos Aires in October, played by the Margarita Xirgu company, but Lorca was murdered in July. War events postponed the opening until 1945, but in Spain the play would stay banned until 1964. The plot is deceivingly simple: Bernarda Alba exerts a tyrant control upon her daughters, who live as prisoners within her house walls. The conflict is deprivation of freedom, blown up to tragic proportions by the death of Bernarda Alba's second husband and her decision to impose eight years of strict mourning. But this mourning goes far beyond the usual black clothing: during the following eight years no one will leave the house, and no man will enter. The reclusion is the results of them being women of a certain social position. The authority/freedom conflict is visible through the submission of the feminine condition -the subtitle Drama of women in the towns of Spain highlights this-. Freedom is stifled by the prejudices of a social class enslaved by appearance and tortured afraid by gossip. Lorca's theatrical experience is highly noticeable in his way of highlighting the conflict without superfluous details: lighting, costumes, text and language, and the actresses' movements, everything is measured to the last millimeter. And the closing words of the main character become a remarkable premonition of what would shroud Spain during many following years. "And I do not want sobbing. Death must be stared in her face." " Silence, silence I have said Silence Professor Borja Rodriguez-Gutierrez adds to this edition a clear introductory essay that dismantles Garcia Lorca's clockwork mechanism, while introducing annotations that allow the reader to fully grasp the meaning of this influential cornerstone of Hispanic letters.

Rquiem por un campesino espaol, a short, elegant and moving account of the tragic effects of the Spanish Civil War on a small Aragonese population, is often called Ramn J. Sender's greatest masterpiece. It was the author's own favorite book and -in his own words- of all his novels it is "the simplest, and the most universal." This characteristic of "universality" flows through all Sender's writings, while he manages to still be the most Spanish of the generation that began to write just before the onset of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. As a journalist who allied himself with the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, Sender (1901-82) was a privileged eyewitness to Spain's struggle, suffering and defeat, a situation he continued to write about after he left Spain in 1938. While his texts are considered essential source material by historians of this era, at the same time, the anguish and pain, losses and victories of the profoundly Spanish characters are portrayed as universal emotions and experiences that continue to move readers of all nationalities. Within Hispanic literature, Rquiem por un campesino espaol (first published in Mexico in 1953, banned in Spain for many years) is considered to stand on a par with Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea within North American literature. Both are brief and profound, and recount intense, dramatic stories that initially seem uncomplicated. They are both important novels that in their brevity and apparent simplicity continue to resonate with essential truths. Three qualities of the novel are emphasized in the essay by Prof. Borja Rodrguez Gutirrez that introduces this edition: the story's meticulous, mathematical structure devised by a self aware writer; its use of reiteration of certain key elements; and the carefully structured allegory with which it transmits its denunciation of the injustice and treachery that underlie history. The careful lexicographic notes included will help the modern reader grasp the plot in all its dramatic, Spanish, intensity.