In Makbara, Juan Goytisolo -- widely considered Spain's greatest living writer -- again dazzles the reader with his energetic, stylistic prose, which he himself compares to a snake: cunning, sly, sinuous. But the themes in Makbara are perhaps more universal than in his earlier works. Makbara is full of its own kind of warmth, humor, and love. After all, makbara is an Arab word referring to the spot in North African cemeteries where young couples meet for romantic encounters. Sex, for Goytisolo, is clearly the greatest cosmic joke, the great leveller. "Sex," he says, "is above all freedom."

This book assesses Goytisolo's contribution to cultural debates in Spain since the sixties and revises the prevailing critical interpretation of his fiction, arguing that his works represent an ethical engagement with postmodernist theory rather than an illustration of it. This monograph offers two new perspectives on Spanish writer, Juan Goytisolo. First, under the themes of authorship and dissidence, it integrates his writing across several genres, providing a rounded assessment of his contribution to cultural debates in Spain since the sixties and arguing that resistance to repressive discourses characterizes his essays and autobiographies as much as his fiction. Second, it revises the prevailing critical interpretation of Goytisolo's fiction by building on four premises: that his novels are less clearly oppositional than prevailing interpretations imply; that, in order to engage with discourses of identity, he employs an idiom which, contrary to his own statements, is not a poststructuralist autonomous world of words; that a textual practice grounded in the recognizable experience of post-Civil War Spain, rather than one which seeks out the realm of pure textuality, is essential to Goytisolo's subversive political intentions; and that the autobiographical element of much of his work constitutes a more complex narrative aesthetic than has been appreciated. The book argues that ifGoytisolo's work is interpreted as an ethical engagement with postmodernist theory, rather than as an illustration of it, then certain contradictions for which he has been criticized are seen in a new and valuable light. ALISON RIBEIRO DE MENEZES is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at University College Dublin.

This reworked and streamlined version of Goytisolo's 1975 novel spins the reader through an angry, prickly catalogue of Spanish colonialism and slavery.

Set during the siege of Sarajevo these fictionalized reflections bear witness to the universal cry for freedom.

New edition of first volume of Goytisolo's great trilogy.

This collection of essays looks at the most recent work of Juan Goytisolo from a variety of perspectives and critical stances. The contributors, all specialists in the work of the Spanish author, employ theories of intertextuality, postmodernist irony, queer ethics and even the esoteric science of Hurufism to uncover the complexities of Goytisolo's creative practice, in particular his radical blurring of the generic boundaries between fiction, autobiography and literary criticism. Such challenging of genre conventions is seen as both integral to the author's own questioning of his identity as an expression of his radical dissidence and essential to the response his work evokes in the reader. Life and writing, autobiography and fiction, constitute the interconnecting poles of Goytisolo's artistic universe. The essays included in this volume explore the varying patterns of confluence of these twin strands in the writer's later work as a whole, but particularly in novels such as Las semanas del jardín (1997) and Carajicomedia (2000). The essays are set in context by a contribution from Juan Goytisolo himself in which he sums up his philosophy of life and writing as a pursuit of 'non-profitable knowledge'.