In Uniting Music and Poetry in Twentieth-Century Spain, Nelson R. Orringer uses both literary and musical analysis to study sung poems in twentieth-century Spain. In nine chapters, each focusing on an individual sung poem, song cycle, or various poems set by the same composer, Orringer enriches and deepens interpretations of the art-songs by comparing the poet's vision to the composer's. In examining composers such as Falla, Turina, Mompou, Toldra, Rodrigo, Montsalvatge, and Rodolfo Halffter, Orringer shows that Spanish art-song is an exceptional product of Spain's Silver Age and reveals a new way to understand and appreciate poems set to music in twentieth-century Spain.

Federico Garcia Lorca (1889-1936) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish poet of the twentieth century; Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) is Spain's most performed composer of the same period. The two were very different - Lorca was gay, liberal, and a member of the avant garde, while Falla was a devout Catholic - yet they had a profound mutual influence. The two developed an intimate friendship, which ended when Lorca was shot by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Lorca in Tune with Falla is the first book to trace Lorca's impact on Falla's music, and Falla's influence on Lorca's writings. Nelson R. Orringer explores the music underlying Poem of Deep Song, Gypsy Ballads, and Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, bringing out the analogous sounds and ideas that emerge in the active, ongoing connection between the artworks of both creators. The book emphasizes how this harmony increases knowledge and appreciation of both artists.

Miguel de Unamuno, perhaps the most influential author of modern Spain, wrote his "Treatise on Love of God" at the height of his career after suffering a crisis of religious faith. Like Saint Augustine's "Confessions" and much of Kierkegaard, the "Treatise" is a study of religious inwardness and proposes to analyze how God can be found within as a beloved person. Not content with simple introspection, Unamuno considers Church fathers such as Athanasius, Origen, and Tertullian as well as modern religious scholars including Albrecht Ritschl, Auguste Sabatier, and Ernest Renan. Although Unamuno abandoned plans to publish the "Treatise" after Pope Pius X issued an encyclical against modernist theology, it deserves serious study as a prelude to his immensely successful "Tragic Sense of Life" and the concentrated work of a great thinker on a deeply serious subject.

Dynamic Structure of Reality makes available in English some of the most mature though of the modern Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri. He first presented this material as a set of 1968 public lectures in Madrid. They were collected, edited, and published in 1989 as Estructura dinamica de la realidad. In 1962 Zubiri had published Sobre la esencia (On essence), a work of metaphysics that was praised by critics with one qualification: its treatment of reality was too static. The 1968 course was devised as a response to those critics. Dynamic Structure of Reality retraces the road Hegel traveled concerning the creation of a self and how that self is realized by an interplay between spirit and nature. Like his great predecessor Jose Ortega y Gasset, and like his great Jewish contemporary Emmanuel Levinas, Zubiri takes religion in all seriousness and locates its questions within the questions of modern philosophy. In harmony with science, he advances a new idea of becoming. Reality, not being, becomes. As reality's traits are revealed, in different degrees, reality resembles God, the universal self-giver. Zubiri systematically touches on many disciplines to show the varieties of self-giving--throughout the universe--of structural dynamism. Supported by a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Education and Culture and United States Universities