Work by McGrath published recently

September 23, 2020

Michael J. McGrath, professor of Spanish, is the editor and translator of one book published July 2020 by the Catholic University of America Press and the author of another book published August 2020 by Purdue University Press.

McGrath also serves as the editor and translator of “The Art of the Game of Chess,” which is the first English translation of Ruy Lopez’s book “Libro de la invención liberal y arte del juego del ajedrez” (Catholic University of America Press). Lopez is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential chess thinkers of all time whose theories of chess are an integral part of how chess is played today. Academics, including historians, linguists, sociologists, and Hispanists, as well as non-academics, especially chess enthusiasts, will appreciate this translation. The translation opens with a foreword by Andrew Soltis, who is a Grandmaster and a United States Chess Hall of Fame Inductee, and includes a critical introduction and more than 275 footnotes.

McGrath is also the author of “Don Quixote and Catholicism: Rereading Cervantine Spirituality” (Purdue University Press). In this book, McGrath proposes to reclaim Cervantes’s Catholicity from the interpretive tradition that ascribes a predominately Erasmian reading of the novel. When the totality of biographical and sociohistorical events and influences that shaped Cervantes’s religiosity are considered, the result is a new appreciation of the novel’s moral didactic and spiritual orientation.