Books like Locos: A Comedy of Gestures

The interconnected stories that form Felipe Alfau's novel Locos 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 to real people; they simply love it and make for it against ray almost heroic opposition". Alfau's "comedy of gestures" - a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy - was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for "The Nation" by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.