New Quesada-Doreste Silva Letters Collection Debuts Thursday
Editor Miguel Pérez Alvarado and Roberto Gil Hernández will discuss Epistolario, a new book compiling letters between Alonso Quesada and Luis Doreste Silva, this Thursday at 7:00 PM at Librería El Refugio in La Laguna, exploring its significance for early 20th-century Canarian culture.
This Thursday, Miguel Pérez Alvarado, editor of the new book Epistolario, will host a discussion with Roberto Gil Hernández. The book, published by Ediciones del Cabildo de Gran Canaria in 2025, brings together letters exchanged between writers Alonso Quesada (1886-1925) and Luis Doreste Silva (1882-1971). They will talk about the book's contents and why it's important for understanding Canarian culture in the early 20th century. The event starts at 7:00 PM at Librería El Refugio, Calle Maya, 21, in La Laguna.
The complete collection of letters between Alonso Quesada and Luis Doreste Silva contains 168 items. These include all the letters, telegrams, and postcards they exchanged from 1913, when Doreste wrote to offer condolences for Quesada's mother's death, until 1925, the year Quesada died.
This new edition gathers all these communications for the first time, arranging them in chronological order. It also includes detailed notes on each letter and reproduces many previously unpublished documents. These additions help readers better understand the lives of both writers and the era they lived in. What's more, Epistolario doesn't just feature Quesada and Doreste Silva; it also includes voices from others in their personal and intellectual circle, such as Néstor de la Torre, Tomás Morales, Luis Millares Cubas, Ortega y Gasset, Josefa de la Torre, Miguel Sarmiento, Pérez Galdós, Claudio de la Torre, and Rita Suárez. These insights come from a wealth of unpublished correspondence preserved by the Cabildo de Gran Canaria in the Luis Doreste Silva Collection.
The Cabildo de Gran Canaria acquired Doreste Silva's extensive collection of materials after his death in 1971. In mid-1975, they purchased his library and archives for 1.5 million pesetas. By the end of that same year, they also bought Alonso Quesada's collection from his daughter Amalia for 700,000 pesetas.
For the past fifty years, this correspondence between the two writers has been kept safe in public hands, thanks to the Cabildo de Gran Canaria. This initiative prevented the letters from being scattered or lost. Since then, the Cabildo has made promoting Quesada's work one of its most important cultural objectives.