A Tramp In Spain

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... XIV.--ON THE ROAD TO ZARAGOZA I I Picked up my knapsack and descended the stairs of the hotel into the hall. At once I was surrounded by waiters and porters and interpreters and boys and servants of all sorts and sizes and descriptions. I could feel their eyes all over me--concentrated, so to speak, into one intense gaze that was at once critical, expectant, and ingratiating. I could feel my measure being taken from crown to toe. For me it was a moment of anxious excitement. As I moved they moved. As I glanced they glanced. All I had in my pocket was two hundred pesetas (about six pounds). My funds had withered through gazing on the sights of Madrid. I grasped the two hundred pesetas firmly in my hand as it lay in my pocket, breathed hard, and tried to dodge. Useless. These hotel servants of sunny Spain knew a thing or two. They were before me and behind me and around me, and at one stage of the game I was afraid that they would down me and take the two hundred pesetas from me. But at last 1 escaped--escaped with only a loss of twenty-five pesetas. Here I was standing outside the hotel in the Calle de Alcala. I was slowly recovering from the scrimmage I had had with the servants who would be tipped. I was just beginning to realise that I was lucky to have got out of the hotel with any money at all. After fortifying myself with a very strong drink in the cafe next door to the hotel I again found myself in the Calle de Alcala--thinking. But in a moment I was myself again, and I turned to the right and moved slowly along--knapsack in hand. It was light, this knapsack, for I had left everything behind me in the hotel that was not absolutely necessary for me to carry. I had a long tramp before me, and the having to carry everything on my back...

New, carefully focused essays providing a thorough examination of Hemingway's groundbreaking non-fictional work. Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of theSpanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied the attention that his novels and short stories have enjoyed, a state of affairs this Companion seeks to remedy, breaking new ground by applying theoretical and critical approaches to a work of nonfiction. It does so in original essays that offer a thorough, balanced examination of a complex, boundary-breaking, and hitherto neglected text. The volume is broken into sections dealing with: the composition, reception, and sources of Death in the Afternoon; cultural translation, cultural criticism, semiotics, and paratextual matters; and the issues of art, authorship, audience, and the literary legacy of Death in the Afternoon. The contributors to the volume, four men and seven women, lay to rest the stereotype of Hemingway as a macho writer whom women do not read; and their nationalities (British, Spanish, American, and Israeli) indicate that Death in the Afternoon, even as it focuses on a particular national art, discusses matters of universal concern. Contributors: Miriam B. Mandel, Robert W. Trogdon, Lisa Tyler, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Messent, Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, Anthony Brand, Nancy Bredendick, Hilary Justice, Amy Vondrak, and Keneth Kinnamon. MiriamB. Mandel teaches in the English Department of Tel Aviv University.

A review and record of current literature.

In spring 1927 V.S Pritchett set out to walk 300 miles across Spain. The country was almost completely isolated, and Pritchett describes a timeless country on the cusp of being riven by civil war, populated by a wonderful selection of characters.

A Tramp's Notebook is a novel by Morley Roberts. Roberts was an English novelist and writer. Excerpt: "When I first went out to the Australian colonies in 1876 in the Hydrabad, a big sailing ship registered as belonging to Bombay, I had a very curious time of it, take it altogether. It was my first real experience of the outside world, and the hundred and two days the Hydrabad took from Liverpool to Melbourne made a very valuable piece of schooling for a greenhorn. I was a steerage passenger, and the steerage of a sailing vessel twenty-five years ago was something to see and smell. Perhaps it is no better now, but then it was certainly very bad. The food was poor, the quarters dirty, the accommodation far too limited to swing even the traditional cat in, and my companions were for the most part Irishmen of the lowest and poorest peasant class. In these days I was quite fresh from home and was rather particular in my tastes. Some of that has been knocked out of me since. A great deal of it was knocked out of me in that passage."