No Pasarán!

Writings from the Spanish Civil War

Pete Ayrton

From the homefront to the heat of battle, the first truly international Spanish Civil War anthology.

Hope, resignation, despair, sadness, humor, confusion, ruthlessness, compassion, kindness, generosity and love inhabit Pete Ayrton's anthology of writings from the Spanish Civil War: there is little sense of triumphalism among the bewilderingly diverse Republican and Nationalist coalitions, all shades of which are represented here.

Previous collections privileged the writings of the International Brigades over those of the Spanish, sometimes excluding them altogether. ¡No Pasarán! corrects the balance: by far the largest contingent of its thirty five writers are Spanish, including Luis Buñuel, Manuel Rivas, Javier Cercas, Arturo Barea, Joan Sales, and Chaves Nogales. The other writers offer contrasting perspectives of participants in the conflict from America (among them John Dos Passos, Muriel Rukeyser and Langston Hughes); Italy (Curzio Malaparte and Leonardo Sciascia); France (Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux); Germany (Gustav Regler); Russian (Victor Serge), Great Britain (including Arthur Koestler, George Orwell and Laurie Lee), Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico.

Acclaimed editor Pete Ayrton brings together hauntingly vivid stories from a bitterly fought war. This is writing of a high order that allows the reader to witness life from the front lines of this momentous conflict.

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. After a brief period teaching philosophy, his work as a translator led to an editorial position and later to his founding of Serpent's Tail. No Man's Land, his collection of writings from World War I, was highly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic and was named one of the Economist's Books of the Year.

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Endorsements & Reviews

"Peter Ayrton rises above the political infighting and sectarianism and gives us a bottoms-up history as told by working-class Spaniards." Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The real strength of No Man's Land is the sheer diversity of the voices it offers, especially those from fronts often overlooked or considered peripheral." The New York Times [praise for 'No Man's Land']

"Ayrton has achieved something very rare and powerful in this book, a brilliantly edited collection of fiction. Essential reading for anyone interested in history, literature, or the human condition." Library Journal (starred) [praise for 'No Man's Land']

"The essential collection of writing from the First World War. Wonderfully wide-ranging." The Times (London) [praise for 'No Man's Land']

"As diverse in attitudes as it is in geography. A tribute to the art of translation. Marvelous." Times Literary Supplement [praise for 'No Man's Land']

"Trail-blazing. Not just another Great War anthology." The Independent [praise for 'No Man's Land']

"Superb. An impressive anthology that bears an extraordinary cargo of human experience, and is an enlightenment for those who think only of the western front when they remember the First World War." The Financial Times [praise for 'No Man's Land']