An open-minded and clear-eyed reexamination of the cultural artifacts of Franco's Spain

True, false, or both?

Spain's 1939-75 dictator, Francisco Franco, was a pioneer of water conservation and sustainable energy.

Pedro Almodovar is only the most recent in a line of great antiestablishment film directors who have worked continuously in Spain since the 1930s.

As early as 1943, former Republicans and Nationalists were collaborating in Spain to promote the visual arts, irrespective of the artists' political views.

Censorship can benefit literature.

Memory is not the same thing as history.

Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe--wrongly--that under Franco's dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In his groundbreaking new book, "Franco's Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936," Jeremy Treglown argues that""oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ""ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate""falsehood: that there was and continues to""be a national pact to forget the evils for which""Franco's side (and, according to this version, his""side alone) was responsible.

The myth that truthfulness was impossible inside Franco's Spain may explain why foreign narratives ("For Whom the Bell Tolls," "Homage to Catalonia") have seemed more credible than Spanish ones. Yet La Guerra de Espana was, as its Spanish name asserts, Spain's own war, and in recent years the country has begun to make a more public attempt to "reclaim" its modern history. How it is doing so, and the role played in the process by notions of historical memory, are among the subjects of this wide-ranging and challenging book.

"Franco's Crypt" reveals that despite state censorship, events of the time were vividly recorded. Treglown looks at what's actually there--monuments, paintings, public works, novels, movies, video games--and considers, in a captivating narrative, the totality of what it shows. The result is a much-needed reexamination of a history we only thought we knew.

Many of these stores are now so famous from film and television adaptations that they need no introduction. Roald Dahl is well known as a master of the macabre and the unexpected in the tradition of Saki, and this volume does not disappoint. He began his literary career by writing about his own experiences in the RAF during World War II but soon developed this talent in a series of short-story collections. He is perhaps even more celebrated as an author of children's books, but the best of his short stories represent a claim for him to be numbered among the most remarkable story writers of the 20th century. The present volume includes for the first time all the stories in chronological order as established by Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, in consultation with the Dahl estate.

Introduction by JEREMY TREGLOWN
"In his daily walks through London," notes Jeremy Treglown in his Introduction to this collection, "Pritchett watched and listened to people as a naturalist observes wild creatures and birds. He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception." This finely attuned sense, coupled with an understanding that nothing in life is mundane, is what makes these stories so immensely enjoyable. Drawing on a vast treasure chest of writings, Treglown has selected sixteen of Pritchett's gems, including "A Serious Question," which makes its debut in book form here. Featuring some of the best work from a long career, this new compilation of Pritchett's brilliantly compact stories illuminates his legendary skills.

Literary criticism has been called a story of reading. In what conditions have the best critical stories been told? From Jenny Uglow's account of literary journalism in the world of Henry Fielding to Marjorie Perloff's praise for the impact of the Internet on poetry publishing and reviewing, Grub Street and the Ivory Tower gives lively case-histories of the commercial and institutional contexts of writing about writing, with an emphasis on the vexed but at best mutually beneficial relationship between journalism and literary scholarship. Topics include the traffic between universities and the wider literary world in the `long' nineteenth century; the role of Blackwood's Magazine in the First World War; Virginia Woolf's work as a literary journalist; the early days of the London Review of Books; and the contested terrain of book reviewing in contemporary Ireland. Most of the contributors are scholars who also command a non-academic readership, as reviewers and otherwise: among them Valentine Cunningham, Hermione Lee, Karl Miller, Lorna Sage, and John Sutherland.