The Op-Ed Novel not only elegantly recounts a vital intellectual and cultural history of post-Franco Spain. Carefully exploring the careers of Spain’s most eminent writers, it demonstrates, too, the osmotic links between political journalism and literary fiction—salutary reading in the English-speaking countries, where politics and literature are still regarded as strangers to each other.

In few places are novelists as powerful as in Spain, with the op-ed page serving as their pulpit and ring for political or cultural pugilism. In this hugely valuable study of the cross-fertilization between opinion writing and Spanish fiction, Seguín discovers a space where ideas are tested and novels are hatched. His book lets readers judge for themselves how much newspapers, novels, and public debate have been enriched as a result—and how much the opposite has happened.

Most Anglophone literary critics have clicked on an op-ed whose byline they recognize from the cover of a favorite novel, but few have thought to examine, as Bécquer Seguín does in this bold study, cases where the writing of novels and op-eds overlap so much as to become a single enterprise. Tracing the growth of a culture in which novels mimic, grow out of, or usurp the functions of op-eds—and vice-versa—this book forces us to rethink our understanding of institutions and of genre, as well as received ideas about fictionality, the status of the intellectual, and the always slippery category of ‘nonfiction.’

There are two types of intellectuals: the brave and everyone else. Bécquer Seguín analyzes why after Franco’s death Spain encouraged the former. His case study should serve as a lesson to America’s public intellectuals, if there is still such a thing, the majority having become dispensable entertainers.