We are pleased to announce the publication of Queering Lorca’s Duende: Desire, Death, Intermediality by Miguel García, which is volume 49 in our Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures series.

It's a little surprising to realise that Lorca, who we think of as a relatively modern figure, is coming up for a run of centenaries. (The twenty-first century is already twenty percent over, a sobering thought for those of us still thinking of it as the new thing.) Last year was the centenary of his first play, though this would perhaps be a painful memory for both playwright and audience if they were still around; 2021 is the anniversary of Lorca's first book of poems, Libro de poemas; 2022 marks a hundred years since he began working with music. There will probably be a host of Lorca books out in 2027, the anniversary of the Generation of 27, an avant-garde crowd among whom Lorca is by far the most eminent. That will, in fact, be a centenary of a tercentenary, since Lorca and co. formed this group to mark three hundred years since the death of Luis de Góngora.

Miguel's book will be out a lot sooner than 2027, however, in autumn 21 or spring 22; and he studies the mysterious later works which followed Lorca's brief but productive New York period.

And the hat? Lorca did not, of course, wear a clown hat, and his imaginative world was a serious place, even if he did once write a verse play about a cockroach in love with a butterfly. But his pencil drawings, deceptively simple works executed with perfectly confident arcs of the hand, are almost as much a part of his poetic voice as are the words, and the cover of Miguel's book is an eloquent example.

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