Spanish writers in Paris by José Esteban

Spanish writers in Paris
by José Esteban

From the balcony of a hotel overlooking the Champs Elysées, Blasco Ibáñez commented to Unamuno. “Don Miguel, this is the world,” and the Basque writer shouted back: “Gredos, Don Vicente, Gredos!” Despite the outburst of the rector of the University of Salamanca, Spanish writers have felt a powerful attraction for the capital of France, they have lived in it and they have described it repeatedly. From Ignacio de Luzán in the first half of the 18th century, to Lorenzo Varela, well into the 20th century, Paris has found its way into the literature of Mesonero Romanos, Modesto Lafuente, Larra, Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Santiago Rusiñol, Azorín , the Machado brothers, Azaña, Corpus Barga, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Ramón J. Sender, Max Aub… All of them and many others appear in the anthology that José Esteban has created as a tribute to a destination that has awakened so much literary inspiration .

JOSÉ ESTEBAN (Sigüenza, Guadalajara) He has divided his literary vocation between editing, research and literary criticism and novels. A dispersed writer, he has cultivated all literary genres. As a novelist, he is the author of El hymn of Riego (1984) and The crime of Mazarete (2016). He has produced critical editions of the aphoristic literature of José Bergamín, of Eugenio Noel’s The Seven Cucas and of Ciro Bayo’s Spanish Lazarillo. His essays also include Breviario del cocido (1987), The Spanish Friends of Oscar Wilde (2012) and Spanish Duels and Duelists (2018). Recently he has published, together with the photographer Antonio Tiedra, The lower neighborhoods of Madrid, according to Galdós. His literary memoirs, Now That I Remember (2019), comprise more than half a century of adventures and misadventures in the always strange world of culture.