At night the band would play paso dobles in the square. When it was time for the tuba solo, the audience became quiet and in the absolute quiet the song of the cuckoo could be…
Posts published by “Manuel Vicent (translated by Louis S. Bedrock)”
When Billie Holiday, whose real name was Eleonora, was born on April 7, 1915, her mother was 13 years old, and her father was still a kid in short pants who kicked cans down the street. It happened in Baltimore, a city then famous for its rats. Her mother split for New York where she scrubbed stairs; her father joined a jazz band and disappeared.
It was in that Paris of the spring in the 1960s, in the Latin Quarter, whose recently watered down streets in the early hours of morning smelled of freshly baked baguettes and croissants, when I…
Underneath all forms of defeatism, there’s always a possibility of victory. This principle was etched into Arthur Miller as an adolescent who was 14 years old when The Great Depression of 1929 engulfed the women’s underwear factory of his father.
When I was 18 years old a bookseller in Valencia clandestinely offered me, under the counter, a red-covered copy of Camus’s book Summer, which had been printed in Argentina. It came wrapped in brown paper and I read it in a hammock surrounded by the sound of cicadas and the odor of pine needles, sweltering in the summer heat.
Graham Greene’s childhood was divided between two loyalties. His father was director of the school of Berkhamsted, located in an old building connected to the house in which Graham lived and in which he had been born through a door upholstered in baize.