Swan Isle Press does not publicize all the books that are “in the works” but when a book is getting closer to publication, we add it to this list. Please take a look, and consider supporting the development of our next books. Another great reason to support Swan Isle Press.
Zóbel Reads Lorca
Poetry, Painting, and Perlimplín In Love
Illustrated
Federico García Lorca
Translated and Illustrated by Fernando Zóbel
Essays by Felipe Pereda, Luis Fernández Cifuentes, and Christopher Maurer
With a Preface by Marta Mateo
Now available for purchase
A cherished erotic play by Federico García Lorca, illustrated by a major Spanish artist.
Painting, poetry, and music come together in Zóbel Reads Lorca, as Fernando Zóbel, a Harvard student who would become one of Spain’s most famous painters, translates and illustrates Federico García Lorca’s haunting play about the wounds of love.


The premiere of Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, an “erotic allelujia” which Lorca once called his most cherished play, was shut down in 1928 by Spanish government censors who confiscated the manuscript and locked it away in the pornography section of a state archive. Lorca rewrote the work in New York, and an amateur theater group brought it to the Spanish stage a few years later. Since his death, the play has also been transformed into ballet and opera.
Zóbel Reads Lorca presents Zóbel’s previously unpublished translation and features contextual essays from several scholars. Art historian Felipe Pereda studies Lorca in the context of Zóbel’s development as a painter, Luis Fernández Cifuentes describes the precarious and much-debated state of the humanities in Zóbel’s Harvard and throughout the United States in the 1940s, and Christopher Maurer delves into musical and visual aspects of the play’s American productions.
Additional information at The University of Chicago Press, click here

Someone Speaks Your Name
Luis García Montero
Translated by Katie King
Will publish December 2022
Pre-order now.
A coming-of-age novel by renowned Spanish writer Luis García Montero.
It’s the summer of 1963 and León Egea, a cocky nineteen-year-old student and aspiring author, has just finished his first year studying literature at the University of Granada and is starting a summer job as an encyclopedia salesman. León, infuriated by the injustices in Spanish society under the Franco dictatorship, comes to find that literature can speak the truth when the reality is clouded.
In this coming-of-age novel by renowned Spanish writer Luis García Montero, León discovers that, under the repressive Franco dictatorship, people, places, and events are not always what they seem. But literature, words, and names open paths to discovery, both personal and political. Through lyrical fast-paced narrative, Someone Speaks Your Name explores literature as a foundation for understanding human relationships, national character, discrete differences between right and wrong, and for pursuing the path forward. As León’s professor tells him: “Learning to write is learning to see.”

Luis García Montero
Additional information at The University of Chicago Press, click here.

Returning from Silence
Jenny’s Story
Michèle Sarde
Translated by Rupert Swyer
Published September 2022
Available now.
A novel that tells the story of a Jewish family in World War II and reaches deep into Jewish history.
Born in Brittany on the threshold of World War II, novelist Michèle Sarde had long been silent about her origins. After her mother, Jenny, finally shared their family history, Sarde decided to reconstruct Jenny’s journey, including her exile from Salonica, move to Paris in 1921, and assimilation in France. The Nazi occupation then forced her and her family to hide and conceal their Jewish identity, and in this retelling, Sarde shows how Jenny fights with everything she has to survive the Holocaust and protect her daughter.
Returning from Silence is a powerful saga that reaches deep into Jewish history, opening with the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and their settlement in a more tolerant Ottoman Empire. Sephardi culture and language flourished in Salonica for four centuries, but with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, and the sense of troubling times to come, Jenny’s family felt impelled to leave their much-loved city and rebuild their lives in France. Their years in France led to change that none could have fully expected, and then, the Holocaust. The trauma lasts well into the post-war period, silencing both mother and daughter in unanticipated ways.
Through this family history, Sarde sensitively raises questions about identity, migration, and assimilation while weaving fiction together with history, research, and testimony to bring the characters’ stories to life.
Additional information at The University of Chicago Press, click here.
The Azure Cloister
Thirty-five Poems
Carlos Germán Belli
Translated by Karl Maurer
Edited by Christopher Maurer
Published February 2022
Available now.
New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli.
This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the “red midnight sun” of hope. Belli’s contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its “azure cloister.”
Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli’s original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This volume also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish in this bilingual edition.
Additional information at The University of Chicago Press, click here.