Böcker av Manuel Rivas

A far-reaching story of an outcast and his bookstore: a home to forbidden books, political dissidents, and cultural smugglers all brought to vivid poetic life “Rivas is a master… His pages bloom like flowers, swerving in unpredictable arcs toward a light-source that is constantly moving.”  —Bookforum The Last Days of Terranova tells of Vicenzo Fontana, the elderly owner of the long-standing Terranova Bookstore, on the day it's set to close due to the greed of real-estate speculators. On this final day, Vincenzo spends the night in his beloved store filled with more than seventy years of fugitive histories. Jumping from the present to various points in the past, the novel ferries us back to Vicenzo's childhood, when his father opened the store in 1935, to the years that the store was run by his Uncle Eliseo, and to the years in the lead-up to the democratic transition, which Vicenzo spent as far away from the bookstore as possible, in Madrid. Like the bookstore itself, The Last Days of Terranova is a space crammed with stories, histories, and literary references, and as many nooks, crannies, and complexities, brought to life in Rivas’s vital prose.

Uno de los problemas tanto teóricos como prácticos de la sociedad actual es alcanzar un constructo de ciudadanía. Para ello se ha convocado a la institución educativa para recrear formas de convivencia integradoras a partir de la diversidad de elementos culturales que convergen en un grupo social, en pro de alcanzar metas comunes. Sin embargo, hay espacios en los que la cotidianidad moldea formas de convivencia que desdibujan la idea de la ciudadana; muestra de ello es la realidad que se vive en los liceos de la ciudad de Los Teques, donde discurso y praxis muestra amplias fisuras. Para dar cuenta de los compromisos onto-epistemológicos que orientan el concepto de ciudadanía, que está construyendo, se formuló un conjunto de proposiciones teóricas desde relaciones pedagógicas alumno-docente-comunidad-Estado, permitiendo la comprensión de las relaciones pedagógicas inherentes al contexto estudiado. Vale la influencia de Cortina en la formulación de la ciudadanía y sus implicaciones; las posibilidades de su comprensión con Foucault y su concepción del poder. La realidad encontró identificación desde Berger y Luckmann.

For Manuel Rivas, words are the most sensitive of creatures. In the same way that frogs or glow-worms are the first to manifest signs of pollution, words suffer as a result of corruption in the socio-political sphere. In his work he is a custodian of all sensitive creatures; his writings document damage and alert us to potential future harm.

In 2003 the Galician writer Manuel Rivas, well known for his novels The Carpenter's Pencil and Books Burn Badly, published in his native Galician language his collected poems, five books of poetry and a selection of recent poems, under the title Do descoñecido ao descoñecido (From Unknown to Unknown). This anthology in English, From Unknown to Unknown, gathers together eighty of those poems and is introduced by the Scottish writer John Burnside, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize, who writes, 'Again and again, as we listen to the account Rivas gives of the world, we come across the beautiful surprise, the breathtaking renewal of some process or way of seeing we normally take for granted… It is an enormous privilege to have this selection of poems in this attentive and imaginative translation… Here is an essential poet whose work illuminates the world and the condition of those who live it.' This English edition was first published in 2009 and is now reprinted.

Sam is a drug addict with a sense of humour. One particular escapade lands him in hospital, where he makes friends with the old man in the adjoining bed and becomes progressively enamoured of the nurse Miss Cowbutt's unsung qualities. In an attempt to wean him off his drug habit, his elder brother, Nico, takes him to the village, Aita, where their grandmother lives, a world far removed from the distractions of modern life, in which even the silence seems animate. He meets up with Gaby the single mother and Dombodán the collector of discarded items. He also becomes acquainted with a slippery customer named 'Sir' who takes refuge in the radio set in the attic. A host of colourful characters - from Tip and Top to the 'relentless lady' - populate this tale, which pits a victim of zero expectations against the haunting traditions of the village.

From the author of "Low Voices" and "The Carpenter's Pencil", the book of short stories that set him on his way and revolutionized Galician literature when it came out at the end of the 1980s. For the first time, Galician prose dealt with the Galician landscape in a modern context, uniting tradition and modernity, placing the poetry of landscape alongside the irony of modern society. In "One Million Cows", a collection of eighteen short stories by Manuel Rivas, the first he published, a boy tries to find out if his cousin is really a battery-operated robot, a sailor who has been shipwrecked at sea turns up dead in a local bar, the inhabitants of a village transport a young suicide so that he can be buried in an adjoining parish, a Galician who has recently returned from England dreams of building a golf course on the mud-flats of his childhood, and a prospective councillor is put off by the fish scales on a fishwife's hands. Manuel Rivas is Galicia's most international author, and once again the reader will be able to enjoy his striking metaphors, his commitment to what he writes, and his lingering eye for detail. Other titles in the series Small Stations Fiction include: "Polaroid" by Suso de Toro, "Soundcheck: Tales from the Balkan Conflict" by Miguel-Anxo Murado and "Vicious" by Xurxo Borrazás.

Readers outside Spain often do not know that the acclaimed novelist, Manuel Rivas is also a significant poet in his homeland, writing from choice in his native Galician. The Disappearance of Snow is a translation of an entire volume which appeared in Spain in 2009, but which, unusually, had the text in all of the country's official languages.

The Low Voices is a novel about life, it is life itself telling stories, it is the memory of the quiet voices of the people I got to know.A brilliant coming-of-age novel from one of Spain's greatest storytellers, The Low Voices is a humorous and philosophical take on memory, belonging, and the nature of storytelling itself.

Manuel Rivas delivers a literary masterpiece about three young friends growing up in a community which is bound by a conspiracy of silenceFins and Brinco are best friends, and they both adore the wild and beautiful Leda.

Contains a cast of animals, birds, as well as humans, that relate stories. In this novel, an old lady tells how the 300 ravens of Xallas are the warrior-poets of the last king of Galacia; a priest explains to a pesant girl, Rosa, that the beautifully carved women in the local chruch are not saints, but representations of the seven deadly sins.

On 19 August 1936, Hercules the boxer stands on the quayside at Coruna and watches Fascist soldiers piling up books and setting them alight. Out of this incident during the early months of Spain's tragic civil war, the author weaves a tapestry of stories and unforgettable characters to create a panorama of twentieth-century Spanish history.

In the summer of 1936, before the outbreak of the Civil War that plunged Spain into three tears of agony and terror, eight-year-old Moncho is beginning his first day at school. while in Carmina the boy listens as an old man relates how a village dog named Tarzan used to frustrate him in his attempts to woo his beloved.

It is the summer of 1936, in the early months of the civil war that engulfed Spain. In a prison in the city of Santiago de Compostela, an artist sketches the Portico de la Gloria. He uses a carpenter's pencil. He replaces the faces of the prophets and elders with those of his Republican inmates.

The theme of non-communication in human relationships in a world saturated with information is the connecting thread in this collection of stories.

A beautiful love story, full of humanity and tenderness, in the dark days of a civil war and the following dictatorship.