Poems are in Spanish, and in English translation.

The award-winning second collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.

This fascinating literary work explores the influence of Andalusia's ancient culture and civilization on the works of Ernest Hemingway and Federico Garcia Lorca. Although born on two different continents, these artists both were rooted in the blood and sand of the bullring and the culture of death, which made life that much more rich. They were both poets, and both men were musicians as evidenced by the musicality of the rhythms of their work. This study explores the cultural and historical influence of Andalusia on the poetry of Federico García Lorca and the prose of Ernest Hemingway, particularly the effects of the region's culture of life and death in their writing. This aspect of Spanish tradition found its greatest voice in bullfighting (toreo), pure gypsy flamenco song, and the creative concept of duende. Even though Lorca and Hemingway were born worlds apart, their works are steeped in a civilization thousands of years old that was molded and shaped by numerous people groups, including the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Iberians, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors, Berber Muslims, and European Catholics. By examining the works of these two men immersed in the rich heritage of Andalusia as expressed during the early twentieth century, readers can more fully appreciate Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises and Lorca's poem Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. They are masterpieces-one of prose, the other of poetry-created by two great authors who influenced and changed the writing styles of those who followed them.

Federico Garcia Lorca called The Public "the best thing I've written for the theater." Yet, he acknowledged, "this is for the theater years from now." Now, half a century later, The Public and another of Lorca's most daring works, Play without a Title, are available in English translation for the first time. Surrealism, folk theater, poetry, vivid costumes, black humor--in the The Public, dramatic traditions are ransacked to develop themes as timely in the 1980s as they were taboo when Lorca was writing: if Romeo were a man of thirty and Juliet a boy of fifteen, would their passion be any less authentic? No, says a young observer of the play within the play, "I who climb the mountain twice each day and, when I finish studying, tend an enormous herd of bulls that I've got to struggle with and overpower at every instant, I don't have time to think about whether Juliet's a man or a woman or a child, but only to observe that I like her with such a joyous desire." In both The Public and Play without a Title, the player himself is of as much consequence as the role he plays. The fierce, stark Play without a Title, with its cast of Author, Prompter, Stagehand in the wings, and hecklers in the gallery, clearly heralds developments in today's avant-garde theater. It also reflects the violence of the times in which it was written. As Carlos Bauer notes in his introduction, neither of the plays in this volume was complete in 1936, when Lorca was assassinated by Franco's forces. Still, both have here the unity and grace of finished tours de force.

Annotation Theodore Fleming's renowned fieldwork on bats has taken him to the tropical forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, and the Sonoran Desert of northwest Mexico and Arizona. This is a riveting personal account of his many adventures, the fascinating animals and plants he has encountered, his professional and family relationships, and the development of tropical biology.

This first English-language edition of Federico Garcia Lorca's Selected Letters presents an intimate autobiographical record of the Spanish poet from the age of twenty to a month before his death at the hands of Franco's forces in 1936. "I was born for my friends," Lorca wrote to Melchor Fernández Almagro in 1926, and these letters reveal the personality his friends found so magical. ("A happiness, a brilliance..." Pablo Neruda called him.) Lorca was by turns sympathetic, generous, demanding, whimsical, insecure, and always lyrical. Over the nineteen years covered in this selection, he maintained a correspondence with his closest friends, particularly his childhood companion Melchor Fernández Almagro and his fellow poet Jorge Guillén, and wrote in concentrated bursts to many others. He could be playful with Salvador Dali's younger sister Ana Maria; deferential to composer Manuel de Falla; lively and descriptive with his family; and exasperating to Barcelona critic Sebastian Gasch as he poured out literary plans and solicited favors, ever impassioned but good-natured. With their frequent enclosures of poems and scenes from plays, the letters also chronicle Lorca's growth as an artist, from self-doubting romantic dilettante to confident, internationally respected playwright and poet. Begun at Columbia University under the aegis of Lorca's brother, Francisco Garcia Lorca, the translation and selection of these letters has been made by David Gershator, poet, teacher, and co-founder of the Downtown Poets Co-op. Dr. Gershator has also provided an informative biographical introduction.