‘We’re more alone now, but not completely.’ One morning at the end of February 2021, I exchanged this text with the writer Edurne Portela. It was the day of Almudena Grandes’ funeral in the Cementerio Civil in Madrid. Each from her own conception of literature, we told the other we would kee
Jonás González Vergara was ready to face his therapist. Before receiving the message with the date and the time of his appointment on his 7AP mobile, bought expressly for the occasion, he’d removed all the quilts, bed sheets and towels that were stored in the chest beneath his bed. Here he had b
My favourite Spanish origin story has the child-murderer and wife-killer Hercules as its protagonist. According to this tale, Hercules came to Spain (referred to as the ‘far West’) to perform one of the twelve tasks through which he could redeem his crimes: capturing the cattle of the fearsome g
In October 2022, Spain was Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, thirty-one years after it was previously awarded the role in 1991. The 2022 theme was Creatividad desbordante, translated for the fair as ‘Spilling Creativity’. Spain’s Guest of Honour programme was clearly a thoughtful,
A white-fleshed delicate taste you hold in your name the thing you love most. Now that’s just so you can read between the waterlines. I think about tonguefish submerged in its name slim like a dark poem hard to catch in the chaos. Won’t you lie down blindside along my riverbed? Since we blend si
ERRATUM NOTICE The Spanish Riveter (The Riveter, edition twelve, April 2023) Due to an editorial error, in the print version of The Spanish Riveter the translation of the poem ‘Straps’ by María Ángeles Pérez López on page 258 was mistakenly attributed to Lawrence Schimel. The poem was in fac
