When, at the age of 38, Federico Garcia Lorca was executed by anti-republican rebels during the Spanish Civil War, he was already one of the world's most celebrated poets and playwrights. photos. (NIA)

    These letters represent Maimonide’s response to three issues critical to Jews in his day and ours; religious persecution, the claims of Christianity and Islam and rational philosophy’s challenge to faith.

    Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along - Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel par excellence. Its opening line is: "The moment one learns English, complications set in." Or, as the novel illustrates, the moment one comes to America, the complications set in. The cast of characters in this book are immigrants from Spain who have one leg in Spanish culture and the other in the confusing, warped, unfriendly New World of New York City, attempting to meld two worlds that just won't fit together. Wildly comic, Chromos is also strangely apocalyptic, moving towards point zero and utter darkness.

    Reproduced from the collection The South & Bene by Adelaida García Morales, translated by Thomas G. Deveny, by permission of The University of Nebraska Press.

    Diez Comedias--the only volume of its kind--contains an ideal selection of the best-known plays of the most representative Spanish dramatists of the Golden Age. Apart from the ten well-chosen texts, readers will find the introductions to each play and the footnotes to be most helpful.

    The description for this book, The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain, 1002-1086, will be forthcoming.