New Spanish Books: The online guide of titles from Spanish publishers and literary agents with rights for translation in the UK. To consult titles available in other markets please click on the above links.
Pequeño tratado de los grandes vicios
This book is a strange psychology treatise on the sources of evil. José Antonio Marina, acting once more as a cultural detective, investigates a powerful and enduriing part of western tradition. The canon of perversity. For over fifteen centuries the detailed plans of the basements of the soul - the seven capital vices - have been passed down. Once more it is demonstrated that human intelligence makes everything it touches unlimited. And desire too. Baudelaire thought this unlimited aspect of vice to be a proof of the infinite nature of human aspiration. In considering the classical formulation of the capital vices, Marina discovers an elaborate system of human passions and their ambivalence. That is, the vigorous drammatisation of our condition. This book is, then, about life.