Felipe Alfau
Felipe Alfau was born in 1902 in Guernica, Spain. He emigrated to the United States during World War I, where he studied music and wrote music criticism for a brief period for La Prensa, the Spanish newspaper in New York.
Deciding to write in English because he felt he could not reach a Spanish audience, in 1928 he completed Locos, which took eight years to find a publisher. Meanwhile, in 1929, he published a children's book, Old Tales from Spain. After the publication of Locos, Alfau worked in a bank in New York City as a translator and wrote one other novel, Chromos. Chromos was not published for more than half-century after it was written, but was a finalist for the National Book Award when it was finally released.
Sentimental Songs (La poesia cursi)
Almost lost to literary history, Felipe Alfau was rediscovered in 1988 with the republication of his proto-postmodernist novel Locos; in 1990 his only other novel, Chromos (written in 1948), was published for the first time...
Chromos
A controversial finalist for the National Book Award in 1990, Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, Chromos anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers...
Locos: A Comedy of Gestures
The interconnected stories that form this novel take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 Arabian Nights and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young author. "For them," he complains, "reality is what fiction is...