Description
Book SynopsisSerge Pey's stories are lyrical, vivid vignettes of life during and directly following Spain's violent fascist regime of the thirties and forties. The collection is a defiant ode to the resilience of the human spirit, each story depicting a small act of human resistance. Many of the stories are surreal, fable-like impressions from the perspective of children caught in the midst of political violence. Pey's understated prose renders a brutal landscape with childlike wonder. It is a strikingly original meditation on courage, survival, and hope in the face of oppression.
Trade Review"Pey’s haunting, inspired collection captures the lives of refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War...Throughout this remarkable collection, Pey’s startling and memorable images have a poetic logic, building complexity and nuance into the characters’ cries for freedom. This masterful collection stands with the best fiction about war refugees." —
Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Lyrical, oneiric, wrenching . . . [The collection's] beauty speaks to the collective, if precarious, survival of clandestine, resistant communities who, for all the violence they have suffered, refuse to be defined by it."
— Carlos Varón González, Public Books • "Donald Nicholson-Smith's translations hold fast to this poetry's unnerving eloquence and simplicity, and its hell-for-leather speed."
- T.J Clark on In Praise of Defeat (shortlisted for the 2017 Griffen Poetry Prize) • "Presenting the text
en face, translator Donald Nicholson-Smith navigates the poet's many styles and moods with poise and opens this landmark writer's body of work up to nonfrancophone readers."
- World Literature Today on In Praise of Defeat
