. .there are no maps nor disciplines to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned. . . ." The duende is portrayed by Lorca as a demonic earth spirit containing irrationality, earthiness, and a heightened awareness of death. In Search of Duende gathers Lorca's writings about the duende and about three art forms most susceptible to it: dance, music, and the bullfight. A full bilingual sampling of Lorca's poetry is also included, with special attention to poems arising from traditional Spanish verse forms. The result is an excellent introduction to Lorca's poetry and prose for American readers.

    Mencken's successor at American Mercury. He was struggling with integrating his two main interests: literary criticism and economics. In economics, value is subjective, whereas the key goal in literary criticism is the discovery of something approximating objective value. The text of this book reflects that struggle in the form of a trialogue. Hazlitt has his characters debate the question of literary value, and pushes forward the proposition that the value of literature is discerned and revealed through the operation of the "social mind." So he ends up rejecting relativism while avoiding mistakes in economic theory. A fascinating study, brilliantly conceived and rendered by a master. As an extra bonus here, Hazlitt offers a postscript on the rise of Marxism in literary criticism. He shows how preposterous it is for Marxism to reject the main corpus of Western literature as hopelessly bourgeois, even while Marx himself read all the great works in his leisure. This is a highly significant essay because it was probably the first attack on Marxist literary deconstructionism ever written!