‘He was the first poet that ever touched me’ Leonard Cohen ‘If they had launched a careful search into every corner of Spain . . . they could not have found anyone better than Lorca to represent the popular soul’ Pablo Neruda 'Lorca's words sing off the page ... These essays show more than a great writer in the making. They show Spain as we have never seen it before.' The Observer 'To render into readable English Lorca's early prose, deeply in debt to the vocabulary and tics of modernismo, is a daunting task, and it seems to me that Peter Bush has risen splendidly to this almost impossible challenge.' Ian Gibson 'Much to cherish ... particularly memorable.' The Guardian

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Lorca's Sketches of Impressions and Landscapes is a unique book, now available in an unillustrated e-book edition as well as an illustrated print edition. Federico García Lorca’s first book, published when he was just nineteen, is a series of meditations on Spanish art, landscapes and history. Brimming with passion and excitement, the young writer travels in search of Spain's essential sunsets in Granada, the Gothic magnificence of Burgos Cathedral, ‘the savage splendour’ of Castile's mountains and plains. While Lorca celebrated Spanish culture – romantic gardens, agonised crucifixes, Gregorian plainchant and ‘the bite of flamenco' – he was also fearlessly critical when, for example, the harshness and celibacy of monks’ lives or poverty and injustice aroused his rage. Serif’s new edition of this formative work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers takes the reader straight to the heart of Lorca’s Spain. With its rich, poetic prose, Sketches of Spain is a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of a creative life cut tragically short by the author's assassination at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.