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Informationen zum Autor Alice Leccese Powers is the editor of the anthologies Italy in Mind, Ireland in Mind, France in Mind, and Tuscany in Mind, and co-editor of The Brooklyn Reader: Thirty Writers Celebrate America’s Favorite Borough. A freelance writer and editor, she has been published in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and many other newspapers and magazines. Ms. Powers also teaches writing at the Corcoran School of Art and Georgetown University. She lives in Washington, D.C. Klappentext This spellbinding literary travel guide gathers poetry, nonfiction, and fiction about Spain by forty English and American writers. Here are letters and memoirs from Lord Byron, Edith Wharton, and Henry James; a poem about Picasso by E. E. Cummings; and a comic tale by Anthony Trollope in which two Englishmen mistake a Spanish duke for a bullfighter. W. H. Auden, George Orwell, and Langston Hughes record their experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway takes on bullfighting, Richard Wright is beguiled by gypsy flamenco dancers, and Calvin Trillin pursues an obsession with Spanish peppers. From Chris Stewart's memoir of his rural retreat in Driving Over Lemons to Barbara Kingsolver's idyllic portrait of the Canary Islands in "Where the Map Stopped,” the glimpses of another world in Spain in Mind will enchant you.Spain in Mind John Affleck Writer John Affleck went to Pamplona to run with the bulls and search for Ernest Hemingway, a man obsessed with bullfighting in his life and in his writing. Hemingway never ran with the bulls, but he saw more than his share of bullfights. After his suicide in 1961, two tickets to the Pamplona arena were found in his desk. As a literary pilgrim, Affleck looked for Hemingway everywhere at the fiesta of San Fermín. Young men miming a bullfight reminded him of a mock corrida that ended tragically in Hemingway's short story "The Capital of the World." He found the bronze statue of "Papa" on the Avenida de Hemingway. And surveying the macho chaos of Pamplona, he recalled Hemingway's warning that it "was no place to take your wife." Ultimately, Affleck concluded that Hemingway is not to be found in the courage of the matadors, but in the struggle of the bull, who can only wage a valiant, if futile, fight. Affleck wrote "Hemingway in Pamplona" for the Literary Traveler, a Web site that encourages travel to places that are part of the literary imagination. Cofounder Linda McGovern says, "Great literature, like great travel, is essentially about experience; one you read, the other you live, both reveal what is true." X Hemingway in Pamplona I've fashioned a makeshift costume out of light khakis, a white T-shirt, and a wild west red bandanna. With me in the line at the bus station are young Spaniards, their uniforms exact: white trousers, white tunics, and the official San Fermín scarf, neatly tied in front and draped across the back. Inexplicably, I'm at the front of the line, a solitary American in questionable attire, and as such am duly ignored. They play at bullfighting, their index fingers as horns, and I can't help but think of Hemingway's short story, "The Capital of the World," in which two young café waiters tie knives to a chair to simulate a bull, until one of them is fatally gored. The bus leaves at eight in the evening. The trip from Barcelona to Pamplona takes seven hours or so, and no one, including myself, gets any sleep. Commandeered by these San Fermín pilgrims, it's a party bus, and rules about smoking, drinking, drug use, eating, and disturbing fellow passengers are happily disregarded. We arrive in the early morning to find no battery of waiting loved ones, no old women hawking accommodations. I follow the throng into the midnight streets. Fireworks burst overhead, their exploding colors raining down and painting the ubiquitous suits of whi...
