No Pasarán!
by Pete Ayrton
From the homefront to the heat of battle, the first truly international Spanish Civil War anthology.Hope, resignation, despair, sadness, humor, confusion, ruthlessness, compassion, kindness, generosity and love inhabit Pete Ayrton's anthology of writings from the Spanish Civil War: there is little sense of triumphalism among the bewilderingly diverse Republican and Nationalist coalitions, all shades of which are represented here.Previous collections privileged the writings of the International Brigades over those of the Spanish, sometimes excluding them altogether. !No Pasarán! corrects the balance: by far the largest contingent of its thirty five writers are Spanish, including Luis Bunuel, Manuel Rivas, Javier Cercas, Arturo Barea, Joan Sales, and Chaves Nogales. The other writers offer contrasting perspectives of participants in the conflict from America (among them John Dos Passos, Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes); Italy (Curzio Malaparte and Leonardo...