Simple text and photographs provide examples of back and forth movement, including the pendulum in a clock, a child in a rocking chair, and tree in the wind.

‘Thirty-five imaginative and humorous poems for an adult and a child to read aloud together. . . . The entertaining verses are varied as to length, rhythm, and subject and are illustrated with harmoniously amusing drawings.’ —BL.

Back and Forth The 100 plus new abstract canvases, carefully reproduced in this book with its unusual format, are the result of one of the most intensive phases of work by Günther Förg in recent years, which took place between Autumn 2008 and Spring 2009. The artist places a sequence of calculated colour fields into a basic grid, which changes from format to format, each individual painting having its own tonal rhythm characterised in turn by a high degree of physical concentration. It is then no coincidence that Rudi Fuchs' linguistically stirring yet acutely observed text discerns an affinity between this work and Piet Mondrians's last und most unusual painting, »Victory Boogie Woogie«. However, the way the palette of colours is organised, supplemented by the structure of each individual colour field, substantially differentiates Günther Förg's endeavour from that his predecessor. In fact it is the free flow of the brushstrokes, the delicate upward and more forceful downward movement alongside the choice of colours, which together propel each individual composition beyond the scope of all previously known abstraction. Or as Rudi Fuch's puts it: »Whether he painted vibrating colour fields, irregular grids comprising raw, fibrous lines, he always had clever interruptive strategies in the implementation. Figuration had to give way in order to release the primordial energy of the brushstroke in its purest form: vigorous abstraction«.

Forth and Back broadens the scope of Hispanic trans-Atlantic studies by shifting its focus to Spain’s trans-literary exchange with the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Santana analyzes the translation “boom” of U.S. literature that marked literary production in Spain after Franco’s death, and the central position that U.S. writing came to occupy within the Spanish literary system. Santana examines the economic and literary motives that underlay the phenomenon, as well as the particular socio-cultural appeal that U.S. “dirty realist” writers—which in Spain included authors as diverse as Charles Bukowski, Raymond Carver, and Bret Easton Ellis—held for Spaniards in the 1980s. Santana also studies the subsequent appropriation of this writing by a polemic group of young Spanish writers in the 1990s whoself-consciously and insistently associated themselves with the U.S. Forth and Back illustrates that literary movements do not unilaterally spread; rather, those that flourish take root in fertile soil and are transformed in their travel by the desires, creative choices, and practical constraints of their differing producers and consumers. It is precisely in the crossing of these currents that plots thicken. The translation of dirty realism, its reception in Spain, and its cultural legacy as appropriated by the young Spanish writers, serve to interrogate a perceived U.S. hegemony. If Spanish realismo sucio has been said to be symptomatic of the globalization of literature, Forth and Back argues that the Spanish works in question posed a subtle reaffirmation of Spanish literature’s strong ties to realist fiction, a gesture of continuity in a decade that seemed to presence the undoing of much of Spain’s “Spanish-ness.” Ultimately, this project asks an ambitious pair of questions at the heart of human culture: how do we “read” each other, quite literally, across geography and language? How do we construct others and ourselves vis-à-vis those readings?

A young woman holds her newborn son And looks at him lovingly. Softly she sings to him: "I'll love you forever I'll like you for always As long as I'm living My baby you'll be." So begins the story that has touched the hearts of millions worldwide. Since publication in l986, Love You Forever has sold more than 15 million copies in paperback and the regular hardcover edition (as well as hundreds of thousands of copies in Spanish and French). Firefly Books is proud to offer this sentimental favorite in a variety of editions and sizes: We offer a trade paper and laminated hardcover edition in a 8" x 8" size. In gift editions we carry: a slipcased edition (8 1/2" x 8 1/4"), with a laminated box and a cloth binding on the book and a 10" x 10" laminated hardcover with jacket. And a Big Book Edition, 16" x 16" with a trade paper binding.

The primary question explored here is: how is the grotesque used to re-evaluate notions of aesthetic beauty? An answer emerges from a study of those thinkers in Schlegel's tradition who evolve a modern, ironic regard for conventional literary proprieties. Furthermore, how does the grotesque rewrite ideas of poetic subjectivity and expression? Here, Back and Forth foregrounds the enormous importance of Shakespeare as the literary example supporting these new theories. Shakespearean drama, which crosses aesthetic borders, legitimises the grotesque while reflecting the blood and gore of a post-Revolutionary Europe. Consequently, in reviewing hybrid texts like the Schlegelian fragments, Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare, Hugo's Preface de Cromwell, and Baudelaire's De L'Essence du Rire, this book uses theories of continental Romanticism to reposition the significance of a vitally radical English aesthetic.