Our Wars: Short Fiction on Basque Conflicts (Basque Literature Series, 8)

Our Wars brings together a wide-ranging collection of stories on the endemic violence that plagued the Basque Country from the eruption of civil war in Spain in 1936 until the definitive ceasefire of ETA in 2011. The voices that emerge are multifaceted: an effeminate Americano innkeeper who must make surprising changes in order to survive and escape the violence that has engulfed his repatriated homeland, a man fleeing the police who finds himself in a surprising book club, a father worried about his daughter's loss of identity, parents anxiously awaiting and dreading a phone call, an estranged wife's paranoia when her husband pops up on the news, and much, much more. The themes of story-telling, transformation, and memory resonate with the power of lived experience. Selected and with an incisive explanatory introduction by Mikel Ayerbe Sudupe, these stories are "about" Basque violence, but are also much more...

Mikel Ayerbe Sudupe earned his degree in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Barcelona and in Basque Philology at the University of the Basque Country. For his Doctor in Comparative Literature, he defended his thesis on Genetic Criticism and the creative process of authors of contemporary Basque literature such as Aresti, Atxaga, Sarrionandia, and Saizarbitoria. He is an assistant professor in the UPV/EHU in the Faculty of Letters and teaches in the Degree of Basque Studies and is part of the Consolidated Research Group  on Historical Memory in Iberian Literature.