The racy and irreverent Spanish tragicomedy that is considered the first European novel-in a spirited new translation
A Spanish "Romeo and Juliet," "Celestina" was published in 1499 and became Spain's first-ever bestseller. Readers thrilled to the salty character of Celestina and her world of prostitutes and black magic even as they mourned the fate of Calisto and Melibea, the young lovers she unites using her wiles as a seller of perfumes and potions. Fernando de Rojas's exhilarating mix of street wit, obscenity, and cultured rhetoric mark "Celestina" as a masterpiece: an original, explosive, genre-defying work that paved the way for the picaresque novel and for Cervantes.

Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya is an incisive examination of the tensions that exist between the West and Islamic societies of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. These essays, originating in Goytisolo's travels in the late 1990s, provide rich historical analysis and moving first-person reportage of life in four explosive war-zones: Sarajevo, Algeria, the West Bank and Gaza, and Chechnya. From the 17th century to the Gulf War, the West has regarded Islam as the enemy on the doorstep, and this book elucidates how relations between Islam and the West continue to be shaped in a climate of ideological, political, and cultural confrontation. Goytisolo examines the fratricidal frenzy in Algeria and the war waged by French police against North African migrants in France, and he describes a besieged Sarajevo transformed into a concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. He contemplates the despair and poverty of Palestinian youth living in the Occupied Territories and details the brutality of the Russian war in the Caucasus. Whether reporting on the fate of the Bosnians after the break up of the former Yugoslavia or analyzing the growing appeal of fundamentalisms - Islamic, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox - Goytisolo displays the same blend of intelligence, vision, and warm fellow-feeling that has made him one the most imposing literary figures of our time. Many of these succinct and eloquent essays first appeared in Spain's leading newspaper El Pais, and English translations were published in the Times Literary Supplement (London). Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931. In 1993 he was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for his literary achievement and contribution to world culture. His translated works include a two volume autobiography, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife, the trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless, and the essays, Saracen Chronicles. Other works by him and published by City Lights Publishers includeThe Marx Family Saga, published in 1999, and A Cock-Eyed COmedy published in 2005. Peter Bush is Director of the British Center for Literary Translation and translated Juan Goytisolo's The Marx Family Saga, which was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclan.

French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada (born 1971) explores postcolonial history and contemporary geopolitical shifts from a non-western perspective, with a particular focus on her hometown of Tangiers. In 2004 she won recognition for her photographic series "A Life Full of Hopes--The Strait Project." This volume provides a retrospective of her films, installations, sculptures and publications.

Surreal fiction from Juan Goytisolo, Spain's greatest living writer. A resurrected Karl and Jenny Marx sitting on their sofa in Hampstead watching a television documentary about the landing of Albanian refugees on a private Italian beach, flourishing photocopies of dollar bills in search of paradise Dallas. Find out how Karl reacts to the demise of the systems Josef Visionariovitch and Co. built on his word Read all about the family life of the Marxes, moving upmarket from Dean Street to Highgate and beyond, yet never free of the hock shop. Marx visits scenes of former triumphs in Moscow, where MacLenin T-shirts and harmburger freedom are all the rage, and returns to a Hampstead housewarming reception and ball filmed by the cameras for a Merchant-Ivoryish Red Baroness--which subsequently becomes the subject of a Saturday-night talk show featuring a feminist sexologist from UCLA, an anarchist from the Spanish Civil Bar, Bakunin . . . But the narrator's publisher, the urbane pipe-smoking Mr. Faulkner, wants a best-selling novel, a proper story with real facts and heart-rending descriptions of the Marx menage. Some hope

For forty-five years, the expatriate Juan Goytisolo has been widely acknowledged as both Spain's greatest living writer and its most scabrous critic. In some thirty books of fiction, autobiography, essays and journalism, he has turned the Spanish language against what he derides as 'Sunnyspain', flaying the 'Hispanos' while excavating their culture's Moorish and Jewish roots. This, his masterful two-volume autobiography first published in the mid-1980s, broke new ground in Spanish letters with its introspective sexual and emotional honesty. It charts the writer's unique journey from a Barcelona childhood violently disrupted by the Spanish civil war to student rebellion against the Francoist dictatorship and exile as a 'self-banished Spaniard' to Paris in 1956. In Paris, Goytisolo fell in love with Monique Lange, befriended Jean Genet, and discovered his own homosexuality as he supported the struggles for Algerian independence. His passionate, iconoclastic pen spares no one, least of all himself, in this striking portrayal of politics and sexuality in twentieth-century France and Spain.