Author: Monika Zgustova
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617981
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
Richly imagined portraits celebrating three historical women—including Goya’s muse—by an “outstanding writer” (Vaclav Havel). In “a unique voice that owes as much to Kundera as to Flaubert, to Hasek as to Tolstoy,” Czech writer Monika Zgustova brings to life the stories of three remarkable women in different countries and eras who defied the social restrictions of their day to find freedom of creative and personal expression (Juan Goytisolo, author of Exiled from Almost Everywhere). On her deathbed in the royal court of eighteenth-century Madrid, the Duchess of Alba, lover and portrait subject of Spanish painter Francisco Goya, recalls the passions of her youth. Living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century, Bozena Nemcova defies the protocols of her arranged marriage and pursues love and the life of a published writer—until her readers condemn her as a danger to society. In 1922, writer Nina Berberova escapes persecution during the Russian Revolution and flees to Paris with poet Vladislav Khodasevich, where the intelligentsia naively covet the promise of the Soviet Union. Each woman attempts to pursue a life of passion, intimacy, and creativity in worlds that rarely accommodate female desire and ambition. In praising Goya’s Glass, Vaclav Havel said: “Monika Zgustova’s concerns are close to my own: the fate of the individual in the hands of totalitarianism. She is an outstanding writer whose fiction invokes the politics and culture of people throughout history.”
Author: Muriel Rukeyser
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 155861821X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
The poet’s newly discovered novel of reporting on the Spanish Civil War “is both an absorbing read and an important contribution to 20th-century history” (Publishers Weekly). As a young reporter in 1936, the pioneering poet and political activist Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Barcelona to witness the first days of the Spanish Civil War. She turned this experience into an autobiographical novel so forward thinking—both in its lyrical prose and its frank depictions of violence and sexuality—that it was never published in her lifetime. Recently discovered in her archive, Feminist Press finally makes this important work available to the public. Savage Coast charts a young American woman’s political and sexual awakening as she witnesses the popular front resistance to the fascist coup and falls in love with a German political exile who joins the first international brigade. Rukeyser’s narrative is a modernist exploration of violence, activism, and desire; a documentary text detailing the start of the war; and a testimony to those who fought and died for freedom and justice during the first major battle against European fascism.
Author: Monika Zgustova
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558618422
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
This “exhilarating novel” of love, longing, and exile “captures the passion of a century in turmoil” (Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of Hiroshima in the Morning). From the “outstanding” Czech writer Monika Zgustova, The Silent Woman depicts a twentieth-century woman’s life against a backdrop of war and political turmoil (Vaclav Havel). Sylva, half Czech and half German, is born into an aristocratic family and lives in a castle outside Prague. She marries a man she doesn’t love and is seduced by the joyful madness of Paris in the 1920s as an ambassador’s wife. When the Nazis force her to state her loyalty, she capitulates, not realizing how this decision will inform and haunt the rest of her life. Sylva’s story is interwoven with that of her son Jan, a world-renowned mathematician and Russian emigre living in the United States, who exudes the restlessness of a man without a country. With insight and candor, Zgustova weaves a multigenerational narrative of the consequences of moral choices and how individuals come to terms with their own forms of exile.
Author: Monika Zgustova
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558617973
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
Not since The French Lieutenant’s Woman has a story captured the passion and desperation of love in different historical frames.
Author: Adrienne Fox
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1477218149
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
On leaving the brash world of showbiz, Digby Lund discovers a tranquil retreat in the countryside of Northern Spain, to pursue his passion for painting. His new villa, situated on the perimeter of a wind farm, has everything he could wish for. Despite hostility and protestations from his trophy wife Cecilia, a model who loathes his new home, finds his one and only newly acquired friend Frank a retired electrical engineer dull and is determined to seek a more glitzy location, Digby remains determined to pursue his new lifestyle even in the face of her antagonism. But when the wind farm takes on a life of its own and Digby discovers that he has been duped into buying the land, the rural tranquility is abruptly shattered by the horrors of a biological experiment dating back to the Spanish Civil War. Digby, Cecilia his wife, Frank his friend, and Juan a Spanish count are trapped as the past rises up from the Spanish soil to terrorise the four occupants of the villa.
Author: Janis Tomlinson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691234124
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era The life of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents—including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career—to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.
Author: Mark McDonald
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588397149
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
This book presents the first focused investigation of Francisco Goya's (1746–1828) graphic output. Spanning six decades, Goya’s works on paper reflect the transformation and turmoil of the Enlightenment, the Inquisition, and Spain's years of constitutional government. Two essays, a detailed chronology, and more than 100 featured artworks illuminate the remarkable breadth and power of Goya's drawings and prints, situating the artist within his historical moment. The selected pieces document the various phases and qualities of Goya's graphic work—from his early etchings after Velázquez through print series such as the Caprichos and The Disasters of War to his late lithographs, The Bulls of Bordeaux, and including albums of drawings that reveal the artist’s nightmares, dreams, and visions.
Author: J. Carlos Arroyos
Publisher: EBL Books
ISBN: 1524328286
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
"The Roots of Francisco" de Goya describes the famous Spanish painter ́s beginnings in Aragon, the fertile ground which nurtured his soul and intelligence and bore his genius. Goya was born in 1746 in Fuendetodos, a small town in the province of Zaragoza, where he lived in a rural and family-centred community. He enjoyed the colourful scenery, which changed with the seasons, and participated in the region ́s frequent traditional festivals and ceremonies. Goya moved on to Zaragoza and Madrid, evolving as a prolific artist and painting many portraits of prominent figures of the era. As a witness to revolutionary times and tumult in Europe, Francisco de Goya enjoyed a life as colourful and interesting as the tapestries and paintings he masterfully created, yet he never forgot his roots in Fuendetodos.
Author: Victor I. Stoichita
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861896662
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
This intriguing book on Goya concentrates on the closing years of the eighteenth century as a neglected milestone in his life. Goya waited until 1799 to publish his celebrated series of drawings, the Caprichos, which offered a personal vision of the "world turned upside down". Victor I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch consider how themes of Revolution and Carnival (both seen as inversions of the established order) were obsessions in Spanish culture in this period, and make provocative connections between the close of the 1700s and the end of the Millennium. Particular emphasis is placed on the artist's links to the underground tradition of the grotesque, the ugly and the violent. Goya's drawings, considered as a personal and secret laboratory, are foregrounded in a study that also reinterprets his paintings and engravings in the cultural context of his time.
Author: Haarlson Phillipps
Publisher: Bill Sinclair
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
"An intelligent literary thriller…much better than the so-called blockbusters I used to read when Head buyer at Waterstone's," Scott Pack, former imprint editor with Harper Collins. Spain…Art…Intrigue…Murder Can two miniature paintings bring down a government? When a young German woman is bequeathed two paintings – presumed destroyed during the siege of Madrid in 1936 – a simple chore becomes a deadly chase. The new blood of Europe encounters the old Blood of Spain, revealing secret allegiances and ambitions of power, as an international cast of characters journey to the dark soul of Spain's ignoble past. Greed, vanity, pride, envy and lust fuel a murderous hunt for ... vengeance? supremacy? or truth?
