Entrevistas con Ricardo Piglia y ocho eminentes escritores españoles: Antonio Muñoz Molina, Juan José Millás, José María Merino, Enrique Vila-Matas, Quim Monzó, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Pedro Zarraluki y Ray Loriga. Van precedidas de ensayos que se centran en la obra de cada autor, de una introducción general, donde se presentan los temas tratados, y las acompaña una bibliografía detallada.

"Writers, publishers, readers and scholars have stopped apologising for the short story: the genre is no longer a bad investment, a trial-exercise for a novel or a minor entertainment, as demonstrated by exceptional writers with an almost exclusive dedication to it, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Munro, Quim Monzâo or Cristina Fernâandez Cubas. With deep roots in classic and medieval literatures, and great achievements in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, the genre of the short story, which benefits from the linguistic tightness of poetry and the narrative comforts of the novel, has finally been recognised as having a (hybrid) identity of its own. This volume re-edits and expands a previous bilingual collection published in 1997. The first edition included stories by twelve writers: Pilar Cibreiro, Cristina Fernâandez Cubas, Paloma Dâiaz-Mas, Adelaida Garcâia Morales, Lourdes Ortiz, Laura Freixas, Marina Mayoral, Mercedes Abad, Rosa Montero, Maruja Torres, Soledad Puâertolas and Marâia Eugenia Salaverri. The present edition adds another four: Nuria Amat, Juana Salabert, Luisa Castro and Berta Marsâe. The stories gathered in this second edition were written between 1980 and 2010, and testify to the richness and vitality of women’s writing in contemporary Spain. With the original texts in Spanish as well as facing-page English translations, an Introduction, notes, and bio-bibliographical information on each author, this volume is a useful tool for students of the Spanish language and culture at all levels. It includes a selection of secondary reading on Spanish women writers and a selection of anthologies of Spanish short stories since 1997"--

The contributors ask the following questions: • What are the different rhetorical strategies employed by writers, artists, filmmakers, and activists to react to the degradation of life and climate change? • How are urban movements using environmental issues to resist corporate privatization of the commons? • What is the shape of Spanish debates on reproductive rights and biotechnology? • What is the symbolic significance of the bullfighting debate and other human/animal issues in today's political turmoil in Spain? Hispanic Issues Series Nicholas Spadaccini, Editor-in-Chief Hispanic Issues Online hispanicissues.umn.edu/online_main.html

Essays in this volume explore the popular cultural effects of rock culture on high literary production in Spain in the 1990s.

What does literature reveal about a country's changing cultural identity? In History, Violence, and the Hyperreal by Kathryn Everly, this question is applied to the contemporary novel in Spain. In the process, similarities emerge among novels that embrace apparent differences in style, structure, and language. Contemporary Spanish authors are rethinking the way the novel with its narrative powers can define a specific cultural identity. Recent Spanish novels by Carme Riera, Dulce Chacon, Javier Cercas, Ray Loriga, Lucia Etxebarria, and Jose Angel Manas (published from 1995 to 2008) particularly highlight the tension that exists between historical memory and urban youth culture. The novels discussed in this study reconfigure the individual's relationship to narrative, history, and reality through their varied interpretations of Spanish history with its common threads of national and personal violence. In these books, culture acts as mediator between the individual and the rapidly changing dynamic of contemporary society. The authors experiment with the novel form to challenge fundamental concepts of identity when the narrative acknowledges more than one way of reading and understanding history, violence, and reality. In Spain today, questions of historical accuracy in all foundational fictions--such as the Inquisition, the Spanish Civil War, or globalization--collide with the urgency to modernize. The result is a clash between regional and global identities. Seemingly disparate works of historical fiction and Generation X narrative prove similar in the way they deal with history, reality, and the delicate relationship between writer and reader.

After nearly forty years of dictatorship and an abrupt transition to democracy in the twentieth century, Spain is now in a moment of great rediscovery. The Peninsular country’s precarious past, paired with its current situation of economic crisis (currently Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in the Eurozone) and movements to recover languages, literatures and cultures other than Spanish, creates a country where artists, authors and directors are exploring existential and social issues in new and revitalized ways. The chapters included in Collapse, Catastrophe, and Rediscovery: Spain’s Cultural Panorama in the Twenty First Century explore filmic, literary and cultural representations of modern-day Spain, and the contributing authors offer insight into how the past has affected the country’s artistic and literary production of today and how film and literature dialogue with the social and economic situation of Spain in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anchored to current cultural and social trends, this collection presents a variety of perspectives and a wide range of analyses of some of the most pertinent contemporary Spanish texts and films with the goal of expanding conceptualizations of the cultural panorama of Spain today.