Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906

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6/25/2010
Writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, 1938 - 2010

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He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010

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Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010

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"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010

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Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

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Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010

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At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009

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You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009

11/8/2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

11/7/2009
Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009

10/14/2009
The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009

9/30/2009
Milton Meltzer, 1915 – 2009

9/14/2009
Iconic poet and punk rocker, Jim Carroll, 1950 - 2009

8/9/2009
Israeli writer Amos Kenan, 1927 - 2009

7/30/2009
Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt, 1930 - 2009

6/23/2009
Indian poet Kamal Das, 1934 - 2009

6/8/2009
Ethnic Studies Pioneer Ronald Takaki, 1939 - 2009

3/29/2009
Pioneer Historian and Scholar of African-American studies, John Hope Franklin, 1915 - 2009

2/20/2009
Sudan novelist Tayeb Salih, 1929 -2009

1/31/2009
John Updike, 1932 - 2009, David Margolick on John Updike's Adieu to Ted Williams

1/22/2009
Norwegian philosopher and founder of the Deep Ecology Movement, Arne Næss, 1912 – 2009

1/4/2009
English poet, novelist, playwright, socialist and pacifist, Adrian Mitchell, 1932 - 2008

12/28/2008
Art, Truth and Politics - Harold Pinter, 1930 - 2008

12/19/2008
Dorothy Porter, 1954 - 2008

11/17/2008
Jazz biographer Peter Levinson, 1934-2008

11/10/2008
'My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'' – Studs Terkel, 1912 - 2008

9/15/2008
I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer - David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

8/15/2008
Mahmoud Darwish, 1942 - 2008

6/17/2008
Media Guru Tony Schwartz, 1923 - 2008

5/25/2008
David Rieff on a lying to his dying mother, Susan Sontag

5/18/2008
Swing Hammer Swing! author, Jeff Torrington, 1935-2008

3/25/2008
Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008

1/22/2008
Poet and translator or Icelandic literature, Bernard Scudder, 1955 – 2007

1/13/2008
George MacDonald Fraser, inventor of Flashman, 1925 – 2008

12/30/2007
Julien Gracq, 1910 - 2007

12/20/2007
Diane Middlebrook, 1939 - 2007

12/16/2007
Gay historian Allan Bérubé dies

12/2/2007
One of the greatest scientists of our era, Seymour Benzer, dies at age 86

11/21/2007
Vernon Scannell, 1922 - 2007

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Norman Mailer, 1923-2007. He went down swinging.

11/6/2007
James Michie 1927 - 2007

9/19/2007
Champion of science fiction for children, Douglas Hill, 1935 - 2007

9/8/2007
Newberry Medal winner Madeleine L'Engle dies

9/2/2007
Julia Briggs, 1943 - 2007

8/30/2007
American short-story writer and activist Grace Paley dies

8/26/2007
Once the Nuremberg Trials were over and a few people judged guilty, no one wanted to talk about it. But I was driven by a desire to know what happened. - Raul Hilberg 1926 - 2007

8/5/2007
Ingmar Bergman 1918 - 2007

6/11/2007
Poet and translator Michael Hamburger, 1924 - 2007

6/3/2007
Classical scholar and archaeologist, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, dies at 62

5/16/2007
Dickens scholar Philip Collins, 1923 - 2007

11/7/2009 Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009

Born in Granada on March 13, 1906, novelist and sociologist Francisco Ayala was one of Spain's leading intellectuals for the second half of the twentieth century. Ayala died Tuesday at age 103. He had long outlived the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco which had led him to flee into exile in 1939 and influenced, in the words of T. Rees Shapiro, "the enduring theme of his literary career -- the toxic effect of power". Although Francisco Ayala taught at leading American universities for over 20 years, very few of his works are available in English. He was the author, however, over 50 books and was the winner of many prestigious literary awards including the Cervantes Prize in 1991 and the Prince of Asturias Prize for Letters in 1998.

In Mr. Ayala's novels, characters trudged through lives of moral and political chaos. "Death as a Way of Life" (1964), initially published in Spanish a few years earlier as "Muertes de Perro," describes a South American country under a totalitarian government. Another of his works, "Los Usurpadores" ("The Usurpers," 1949), was a collection of short stories he wrote in Argentina and examines the immorality of the abuse of power.

In one story from the collection, "The Bewitched," a Spaniard during the Middle Ages spends his life fighting bureaucracy and trying to gain an audience with the king. When he is finally granted a visit with the monarch, he finds the ruler so mentally and physically handicapped that he can't speak coherently, let alone govern a country. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was reported to have called the story "a masterpiece of Hispanic literature."

"The Inquisitor," another notable story in "The Usurpers," focuses on a grand rabbi who converts to Catholicism and is so fanatical in his prosecution and devoted to proving the purity of his faith he doesn't spare his only daughter from arrest when she denounces his work.

The book's theme, Mr. Ayala wrote in the introduction, was "power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation." - from the Washington Post obituary by T. Rees Shapiro.

The Usurpers
Francisco Ayala
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