No Pasaran!: Writings from the Spanish Civil War

(Paperback, Main)

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Hope, resignation, despair, sadness, humour, confusion, ruthlessness, compassion, kindness, generosity and love inhabit Pete Ayrton's anthology of writings from the Spanish Civil War: there is little sense of certainty and still less 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 Pasarn! corrects the balance: by far the largest contingent of its thirty-five writers are Spanish, including Luis Buuel, Manuel Rivas, Javier Cercas, Arturo Barea, Joan Sales and Chaves Nogales. The remainder 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, Andr Malraux and others); Germany (Gustav Regler); Russia (Victor Serge); Great Britain (including Arthur Koestler, George Orwell and Laurie Lee); Cuba, Argentina and Mexico.

Pete Ayrton brings together hauntingly vivid stories from a bitterly fought war. This is powerful writing that allows the reader to witness life behind and at the front lines of both sides.

Reviews

In this superb, shattering book of testimonies, Pete Ayrton has organised the best of all introductions to the Spanish Civil War -- Neal Ascherson
These pieces bring home the visceral nature of the Spanish conflict, a clash of ideologies that defined a generation and continues to reverberate today * New Internationalist *
With every page the reader learns and appreciates more, with deeper insight than previously, about the true nature of the war * Morning Star *
No Pasarn! evokes to perfection this most 'impossible' of wars - only through such outstanding writing can we understand what these wars really meant, and cost -- Helen Graham, author of The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction
With a judicious mixture of famous and recondite pieces, admirably translated by a well selected team, the editor offers a touching blend of humour and pathos, reality and artifice * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. After studying and briefly teaching philosophy, a period of left-wing tourism in France and Italy led to his learning to read and converse in these languages, and to take part in the intense, opaque discourses of Marxism. A period of work as translator led to a job as editor with Pluto Press and to his founding in 1986 of Serpent's Tail with the specific remit of publishing fiction in translation; this includes two First World War classics Frederic Manning's Her Privates We and Gabriel Chevallier's Fear, both represented in No Man's Land.