Federico García Lorca died young, at the beginning of the Spanish civil war, probably killed by the falangists, either for being homosexual or socialist or both, or else for more private reasons. Nobody knows for sure.
A few years earlier, between 1929 and 1930, he traveled to the American continent, spending time in New York, Vermont and finally in Cuba, before returning to Europe. He managed to witness the '29 Wall Street crisis, therefore experiencing both the excesses that predated it and the desperate times that followed it. He wrote this collection of poems during those months.
This collection of poems by the epitome of the Poètes Maudits has inspired generations. Baudelaire was the first great poet to make an extensive, almost morbid use of sex, alcohol, drugs and death as the main themes of his work.
Borges is an outstanding South American author. This is a collection of poems in praise of his hometown, the capital city of Argentina, Buenos Aires.
Unlike other works about the city, this doesn't deal with the usual (stereotypical) topics such as the port districts, tango, Italian and Spanish heritage.
Nietzsche's work, unlike Plato's Symposium, does not read like a story, with a plot, characters, action and dialog. It's a collection of anectodes, philosofical thoughts, not necessarily easy to grasp and sometimes quite contradictory.
Oscar Wilde, the famous Irish author, was incarcerated in Reading jail due to a homosexuality-related scandal.
In this work, a ballad as rhyme and metric are concerned, Wilde talks about a man who is sentenced to death penalty for having murdered his wife.
In this book Plato, the great ancient Greek philosopher (some would say the greatest of them all) - expounds his views about the subject of love.
Cotton balls,
dipped in lead,
weighing down
on worn out roofs.
Smell of storm,
moistened lips,
hurrying steps
on fake fruit slabs.
Eyes transfixed
I watch that scene,
I sense a monster
watching me.
Blinking lids,
shiny eyes,
am I enthralled
or terrified?
The air explodes,
my heart restarts,
I'm the only madman,
who doesn't rush.
The ground is blue,
the sky gray-white,
It's reversed reality,
more than just art.
I'm not sure how Frank McCourt managed to write such a heart rendering story about poverty, alcoholism, child mortality and hunger that still paints lots of smiles on the reader's face. It's a wonderful gift for an author and a story teller in general.
Sultana, a princess of the Al Saud royal family, decided to tell the story of her life through the pen of Jean Sasson, an American author. Her main purpose was to expose the pitiful situation, at the time of her youth, of women in Saudi Arabia, a country dominated by men, where the most significant event in their lives seems to take place when they are handed over as private property from their fathers to their husbands, which in most cases they are not allowed to choose by themselves.
