Admired by people as diverse as the American writer Diane Johnson and the British journalist Rod Liddle, this, the final novel of Nigel Dennis, should be better known. It is a short parable about how to make order out of chaos. The chaos is a third world war. The protagonist claims to be a cartographer, is suspected of being a spy and is most certainly a busy and dedicated coward. His world in the midst of war is a greenhouse, a privileged position for a prisoner who wants to keep out of things. All he wants to do is tend his plants through the long wicked winter. But he is persuaded to take a fatal and decisive role in the bickering rivalries between the captors who are themselves half afraid of his monumental fear.

Unavailable for nearly thirty years it takes its place on the Faber Finds list with Nigel Dennis's other two novels, "Boys and Girls Come Out to Play" and "Cards of Identity."

Boys and Girls Come Out to Play was Nigel Dennis's first acknowledged novel. It makes use of his years in America where he worked for eighteen years. It can be described as a satirical adventure story in which the main character, Max Divver goes to Poland in the spring of 1939 to report on the crisis. As well as exploring the character of American 'liberalism', he novel explains Max Divver complicated attitude to European life and politics. Starting in the stifling atmosphere of home and professional life among the New York intelligentsia, it crosses the Atlantic to a Polish hotel, portraying as it goes, in addition to numerous minor Americans and Europeans, Divver's frustrated wife and child, the expatriate American engineer who is fated to be Divver's nemesis, the engineer's young and desperate wife, and the all-powerful Mrs Morgan of the progressive "Forward," whose neurotic son accompanies Divver to Poland and inherits the task of recording Divver's life and fate for the benefit of the younger generation.

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""When first published in 1949, "Boys and Girls Come Out to Play" ("A Sea Change" in the U. S. A.) won the Anglo-American novel award.

When first published in 1955 no less a critic than W. H. Auden wrote, 'I have read no novel published during the last fifteen years with greater pleasure and admiration.'

A long-empty country house is reopened by Captain Mallet, his beautiful second wife and his dashing son Beaufort. Their task is to restore Hyde's Mortimer to its former order in preparation for the summer session of the Identity Club. And their scheme is to persuade various local inhabitants, by employing questionable methods, that they are not really who they think they are. Then the Club meets for the reading of three very bizarre papers.

This is not only Nigel Dennis's most famous work, it is one of the great satires of the twentieth century. W. H. Auden was not alone in praising it. The literary critic, Walter Allen, referred to its 'exuberance of comic invention', John Davenport compared it to Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Suicide Club', and "The Times" hailed it as 'one of the funniest, most intelligent and far-reaching pieces of satire.'

Faber Finds is reissuing the following of Nigel Dennis's novels: "Boys and Girls Come Out to Play," "The Cards of Identity" and "A House in Order "

Lorca, icon and polymath in all his manifestations. A Companion to Federico Garcia Lorca provides a clear, critical appraisal of the issues and debates surrounding the work of Spain's most celebrated poet and dramatist. It considers past and current approaches to the study of Lorca, and also suggests new directions for further investigation. An introduction on the often contentious subject of Lorca's biography is followed by five chapters - poetry, theatre, music, drawing and cinema - which togetheracknowledge the polymath in Lorca. A further three chapters - religion, gender and sexuality, and politics - complete the volume by covering important thematic concerns across a number of texts, concerns which must be considered in the context of the iconic status that Lorca has acquired and against the background of the cultural shifts affecting his readership. The Companion is a testament to Lorca's enduring appeal and, through its explication oftexts and investigation of the man, demonstrates just why he continues, and should continue, to attract scholarly interest. FEDERICO BONADDIO lectures in Modern Spanish Studies at King's College London. CONTRIBUTORS: FEDERICO BONADDIO, JACQUELINE COCKBURN, NIGEL DENNIS, CHRISTOPHER MAURER, ALBERTO MIRA, ANTONIO MONEGAL, CHRIS PERRIAM, XON DE ROS, ERIC SOUTHWORTH, D. GARETH WALTERS, SARAH WRIGHT

Writer, critic, and cultural activist Jose Bergamin (1895-1983) was unjustly relegated to the sidelines of contemporary Spanish intellectual life for reasons that have more to do with his political dissidence and long periods of exile than with the interest and importance of his written work. This book represents the first attempt to come to terms with that work. Professor Dennis's study focuses on the period 1920-1936, the so-called silver age of Spanish literature, during which Bergamin rose to prominence alongside a group of superlatively gifted writers and friends, among them Frederico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillen, and Pedro Salinas. It sets out to explain the nature of the relationship Bergamin had as a critic and prose writer with the major poets of the 1920s and 1930s, and at the same time systematically examines the singularity of his own work as an aphorist, essayist, and dramatist. Professor Dennis also devotes attention to explaining the sense of Bergamin's initiative in founding the important journal Cruz y Raya (1933-1936) and the role this publication played, both culturally and politically, during the troubled years of the Second Republic. This book not only fills a notable gap in our understanding of pre--Civil War literary and intellectual life in Spain, but also lays the foundation for all future research into the work of this fascinating and enigmatic writer.