“Beautifully lyric . . . [Lawrence Thornton’s] prose is finely honed and his touch sure.”—Chicago Tribune The year is 1936. The tide of fascism is overwhelming Europe. In Spain the Guardia Civil wages war on the citizens. Spanish-German novelist Joaquín Wolf leaves his adopted home in Paris for a short visit to Spain, where he will spend an evening that will change his life. For there he meets the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and in two brief hours they forge a close friendship. Within days Lorca is dead, executed by the civil guard, an event that sets Wolf on an irrevocable course as he joins the struggle against Franco. Wounded, Wolf returns to France to find German fascism threatening the city he loves. Banding together with a fiercely political group of writers named the Lorca Club, he again becomes a soldier of the resistance—this time using his most potent ammunition: words. Through the Lorca Club he meets Ursula Krieger, another exiled Berliner living in Paris, a survivor not only of war but of the bloodless horrors of postwar life. Though the scars of her past keep her from reaching out to him, Wolf’s quiet, steadfast love vanquishes shame and pain. And while Lorca taught Wolf what must be fought against, even to the death, it is Ursula who teaches him what is worth fighting—and living—for.

WRITING POETRY is intended to be an all-purpose poetry writing textbook, a fount of inspiration and informtion on the writing process, a solid first step for beginners, and a source of ideas for writers and teachers at all levels. Taken from the Greek word meaning making something up, poetry gos beyond the simple act of creation to inspire. In this textbook, the core structure of the genre is dissected so the intangible may be a little more understood. WRITING POETRY is an appreciative study of an allusive art.

Arguably the most significant literary figure of twentieth-century Spain, Federico Garcia Lorca was an accomplished poet, playwright, lecturer, musician, and theater director. With the exception of Cervantes, no other Spanish writer has attracted more critical attention than this versatile artist. In Understanding Federico Garcia Lorca, Candelas Newton explores Lorca's literary contributions through a critical reading of his work and an explanation of the images and symbols he relied upon to manifest his primary themes.

Federico García Lorca's autobiographical play, Once Five Years Pass deals directly with the discovery of his homosexual identity. While themes of sterility, desire, repression and death are central to this work, these themes are masked by the surrealistic language and plasticity that characterized his experimental theatre. Later, in his more traditional rural plays, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba, Lorca sought to examine, at a safer distance, the themes elaborated in Once Five Years Pass. To this end, he removed himself from the center of the drama, creating a series of rural plays featuring women as the protagonists. An examination of the symbolic content in Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, which is more accessible in these traditionally structured works, supplies the key to the interpretation of Lorca's «unperformable» play.