Wars do not end, but rather accumulate and, with them, forced movements of people: exiles, refugees, displaced persons, they can be called in many ways, but they are the non-fatal victims. When, among these exiles, there are writers, they usually leave texts tinged with sadness or melancholy for the lost homeland. What is not so common is that the texts take on a literary form close to fantasy, and I say close only because Desaparèixer, this perfectly geared nouvelle, with its feet in a Europe that has lost its identity and its head in a phantasmagoric world, has vanishing points that escape the realist corset. The oscillation between realism and fantasy makes one think of an acrobat walking a tightrope over European cities, train stations, impersonal hotel rooms, escape rooms, and circus rings to a point of no return from which one's own identity is completely interchangeable. As Joseph Roth said: "What is a man without papers? Less than a paper without men!"

Every debut novelist is expected to have a voice. They're also expected to have a technique, a style, a skill, or the ability to create memorable characters, but what will make them stand out from the crowd is whether they've managed to offer a different, original introduction. If we were right now inside Etna Miró's novel (Barcelona, ​​2001), "different" and "original" would be in italics to emphasize irony and detachment, two of the mechanisms the author uses most effectively to describe a group of Barcelona residents—those she has had the brilliant idea of ​​creating—who are students of philology, literature, or political science. Like a swarm buzzing with great social intelligence around the hive formed by the islands of Ildefons Cerdà, they come and go, chatting about everything except money, as if they were always in front of an audience. What isn't foreseen is that they will have "spiritual crises," and that's what happens to the novel's protagonist, Amelia de las Camelias, a charmingly ornate, old-fashioned name, an obvious literary reference. The one who has pushed her into it is Amelia herself, who has put on a beautiful shell, but doesn't realize it's empty: she's an Emma Bovary who, no matter how much she reads, doesn't grasp a single one of life's ironies.

That a novel of the importance ofBelovedThe fact that it was never translated into Catalan is one of those things that infuriates. How many future writers could have seen themselves reflected in them if the publishing system had done its job more than thirty years ago? And, much more importantly, how many readers would have raised the bar of their reading comprehension and wouldn't be seduced by any bound nonsense lining the new releases shelves? Reading books of the quality and complexity ofBelovedIt acts as an antidote to banal and commonplace literature. Reading it in Esther Tallada's magnificent translation is, moreover, a luxury.

The death of the mother of French writer Emmanuel Carrère It had to culminate in a book. The inevitable recollection of the past that accompanies the death of a parent was the lever that propelled him, once he had digested the highly sensitive material, to write the mixture of chronicle and family autobiography that is KolkhozA book full of surprising relatives—Carrère has a cousin who is the president of Georgia!—and in which he himself would be like a kind of first cousin ofA Russian novel and of Limonov, two of the peaks of Carrère's work. With a translation by Ferran Ràfols Gesa that sounds wonderful, Kolkhoz It revisits Russian themes and even brings back some of the characters from those books, but it plays on different ground, that of family history linked to the history of the 20th century: can the description of a private room tell of a historical shift? In the land of Georges Duby, the answer is "of course," and Carrère proves it beyond a doubt.

Several novels by Zadie Smith (London, 1975), one of the most important writers in contemporary English literature, had been published in Catalan since her debut, White teethBut the vicissitudes of the publishing world (what gory novel wouldn't Smith herself write!) have condemned it to the unglamorous oblivion of secondhand bookstores, and thus the appearance ofThe fraud, her latest novel, splendidly translated by Marta Pera and published by the very young Jande publishing houseThis is great news. And we hope there will be many more to come, because Smith's novels are too good not to be part of the literary conversation among Catalan-language book readers.

This novel is another stone – and there are many already, thanks to the efforts of the Raig Verd publishing house – to build the universe Ursula K. Le Guin in Catalan and to understand the scope of the work, so varied, of one of the most important authors of Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Lavinia It doesn't belong to any of the famous cycles; it goes its own way, like its protagonist. It's more of a historical novel than a fantasy, and at the same time, it's an exercise in rewriting history. The Aeneid of Virgil. If in the twelve-book epic the character of Aeneas's wife has not a single line of dialogue and is always in the shadow of the Trojan warrior, Le Guin wanted to put her at the center and gave her the voice she lacked in the classical world. Part of the book's merit lies in this gesture. Originally published in 2009, it belongs to the wave of works that challenge the flatness of patriarchal tradition and, in a creative way that doesn't negate but enriches it, assert that history cannot have been written or starred in solely by men. In the epilogue she wrote at the end of the novel, the author declares her unconditional love for Virgil and says that what she intended was only "a meditative interpretation suggested by a minor character in his story, the unfolding of a clue."

First published in 2007, The red parts It is the chronicle of the trial of a case reopened thirty-five years after it remained unsolved: the murder of the author's aunt, something that, without having directly affected her when it happened, because she had not even been born yet, had always hovered like a ghost over the family, who could not find peace knowing that the murder of March 1969 was still at large. But Maggie Nelson is an author who is both too powerful and too subtle. to write only A legal chronicle: the book delves into intimate details of her childhood and youth, marked by other losses, pain, and a growing sense of bewilderment, and also rises into theory by proposing a series of highly pertinent reflections on the reasons for the collective obsession with the violent deaths of women. These three paths—chronicle, autobiography, and essay—intersect here and there, seemingly without order, on every page of the book, organically, as only a highly skilled hand knows how to orchestrate. And indeed, the author ofThe Argonauts, the book that would catapult her to fame a few years later —or, at least, as one of the icons of a new way of writing autobiographical essays— she was already successfully demonstrating here how to move elegantly and radically from literary theory to a small white box containing the remains of her deceased father's bones. This audacity comes naturally to her, and she masters literary tools with ease. If, in addition, the translation is impetuous and playful, as is the case here, the text becomes as captivating as the original.

The author of this collection of short stories, Pol Estrada (Castellcir, 1998), has perfectly assimilated and digested the legacy of several Catalan short story writers: from the light, domestic delirium of Francesc Trabal—from whom he takes the quote that opens the book—to the irony of Calders, the darkness of Monzó, all while elegantly avoiding the burden that vulgar imitation could impose. He writes fluently and with a refined language, crafting stories with a tone somewhere between melancholic and angry, forcing the reader to decide whether it's better to laugh wholeheartedly or worry about the direction the world is taking.

A little overshadowed by the enormous Carson McCullers and those teenage girl characters who wander through dusty towns full of criminal secrets while on the cusp of adulthood, Siri HustvedtFor her second novel, so far unpublished in Catalan, she created a nineteen-year-old Lily Dahl and placed her in a town in Minnesota (which couldn't have been very different from her own) where she serves coffee in the money that lies beneath her house as she observes the behavior of the regular customers. She's an aspiring actress, dreams of running away to the big city and making it big, but her reality is making scrambled eggs for Franck and Dick, a pair of brothers who are farmers and barely speak, or some bacon for Martin Petersen, a former childhood playmate who has become an ex-con. She has a neighbor who is a retired actress who helps her prepare for a role in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream And, above all, a tenant in the hotel across the street named Ed Shapiro, who is famous and incredibly handsome. At night, Lily secretly watches him paint, driven by his creative fever, and the erotic game soon begins.

We can never thank Antònia Carré-Pons, professor of medieval literature at the Autonomous University, enough for deciding to turn the family butcher shop, Cal Carré, into a small publishing house, because giving up cured meats is not only good for cholesterol but also opens the door to food for the soul and allows us to read gems like this one. History of Paris and Viana (Written around the 14th-15th centuries): a pure chivalric adventure set in the time of Charlemagne, possessing the temperament, rhythm, and wit that every good story should have. Thanks to her detective work among medieval manuscripts from different periods and languages, Gemma Pellissa Prades presents us with the amorous misadventures of two characters, Paris and Viana, the daughter of the Dauphin of France and a very young, courteous knight, in a Catalan that flows beautifully. They strive for love and overcome all kinds of obstacles.

This very short and perfect novel is the fourth published by Edicions de 1984. Tessa Hadley, an English author who masterfully portrays family relationships and paints scenes set in the placidity of a Sunday afternoon that are inevitably clouded. The party It is a kind of tragedy in three acts, in the classical style, that narrates the coming-of-age of sisters, Evelyn and Moira, who are middle class and daughters of a dysfunctional marriage: the husband no longer hides that he has a mistress and the wife endures it as best she can. Sunday roastThe main English family meal: as she might say with curlers in her hair, on the verge of tears. But Tessa Hadley is the queen of alternating moments of maximum light and maximum darkness, detecting the sadness hidden in the happiest moments and the light born from the deepest tragedy. The scene immediately following the family meal, where the two daughters comb and dress their mother at a dressing table, is of exemplary beauty and elevation, made solely with combs, hairpins, and dialogues laden with subtext.

Use the lyrics from the album Main Festival of La Trinca as the common thread of a novel that could be the script for the next installment of Fast and Furious It's nothing short of genius. Edgar Cantero She answers with a slap in the face and a smile to all the self-important know-it-alls who wonder if Catalan "is ready to explain certain things" or who complain that Catalan literature "doesn't yet cultivate all genres." There's no need to hold a round table discussion to reflect on her: like in action movies, the answer lies in the facts.

Here is a heroic novel. Because it is bold and electrifying, and because it elevates these poor girls to the status of heroines, who, in the hands of any other writer, would be little more than supporting characters. What another writer would have resolved with a sordid, dirty, and dark portrait of unfortunate women who have found a way out in boxing, a young debutante named Rita Bullwinkel (California, 1988) has decided to narrate as an epic legend, a mythical tale with female protagonists fighting for a place where they can exist. Enough with pantheons of male athletes with perfect bodies: make room for the muscular curves of the female boxers of Reno, Nevada.

Starting with the Letter to the father, of Franz Kafka, the list of novels that have explored the relationship between parents and children is long and extensive. Within this broad subject, there are quite a few novels in which children demand explanations from their parents. The most numerous are surely those about sons versus fathers, followed by those about daughters versus mothers or fathers, and perhaps the fewest are those about sons confronting their mothers. Boys or men who, having reached a certain point in life, look back and want to settle accounts with the woman who brought them into the world. Well, Marc Cerdó has written one of them, and a very particular one at that: a novel in two voices, her own and that of her absent mother, who stir and love each other, ignore and spy on each other, and read and almost write to each other. The book is a magnificent example of how to write a novel that doesn't follow any manual: it doesn't make all the pieces fit together, it has no climax, it doesn't present characters through stellar irruptions in scenes expressly constructed to present them... It moves in unmapped territory and advances by placing one piece after another until completing a piece breaks the most conventional social norms. In addition, it contains a series of profound, almost aphoristic reflections on life and death and mother-child love, which represent the most successful, and melancholic, moments of the reading.

Many of us have the image of Tísner on his head: that eye patch, that pear-shaped beard, that friendliness. We've seen him in some television interviews, we know he was the brother-in-law of Pere Calders –with whom he had gone into exile in Mexico– and also that he did the crossword puzzle of The Vanguard before Màrius Serra, but... what do we know about Tísner the writer? At most, that he is the author of Words of Opóton the Elder, his best-known novel, an alternate history in which the Aztec emperor Moctezuma conquers Europe; but this is not the only book he wrote.

More than a hundred years have passed since the publication of this little wonder called Chéri (1920) and, as if it were a watch built by Switzerland's most competent professional, there's nothing that doesn't work: the provocation, the sensuality, the irony, the mordacity, the intelligence, the social criticism, and the psychological depth that the great Colette (1873-1954) was capable of. The book holds up not only because the story of love and passion between a woman approaching fifty and the son of one of her friends, who is not even twenty-five, is still unconventional. It holds up, above all, because of the French writer's abilities: the natural perfection of the dialogues, the subtlety of each gesture of the characters, the acute sense of reality demonstrated by each of the observations made by the narrative voice, and the progression of events, which is studied to the millimeter and leaves out of the frame crucial moments of the, or more than just the, lovers' unbridled love.

Emmanuel Bove (1894-1945) was originally named Emmanuel Bobovnikoff and was the son of a Russian-Jewish father and a Luxembourgish maid. He lived a hectic life, between cheap boarding houses and shabby hotels, lung disease, and financial hardship. In 1924, the writer Colette published his first book, which is now available in Catalan thanks to a brilliant translation by Josep Alemany. My friends It is a perfect example of Bove's talent, a "secret" writer, highly recommended among writers, who has not made much fortune below the Pyrenees. Patrick Modiano, although Bove lacks the fog that surrounds the French Nobel Prize winner's characters, but rather the melancholy and sadness in the background. Everything is cleaner and clearer, rawer and more concise: "Before each customer there was a bottle and a glass. Music could have been made with a knife."

With this fourth novel, the film director and performer Miranda July –having just turned fifty– has overcome a kind of symbolic barrier that had been erected in the middle of the path of his life and has entered the realm of the Great Writers. But she didn't do it dressed as a distinguished lady, but rather, she got down on all fours and fucked everything that was in front of her: boys, older ladies, and girls, in abundance. She got dirty, she descended into the deepest abyss of femininity, and she emerged renewed, like the protagonist of this novel: "She could have always been like this, like in this room: imperfect, genderless, playful, shameless. She had everything she needed in her pockets, a complete soul."

In addition to being a poet and literary critic, Joan Todó is a vigorous narrator, author of a narrative that elaborates very interesting and unconventional pseudo-novelistic forms as The first horizon (L'Avenç, 2013) or The green one is taken (Godall, 2021), which has also been dedicated to the form of the short story.In pockets (LaBreu, 2011) and Thieves (LaBreu, 2016), without forgetting "The Navel of the World", a story included inIn search of flamenco, a volume co-written with Jaume C. Pons Alorda and Sebastià Portell, whose geographical focus was the Ebro Delta, one of Todó's literary territories. He was originally from the interior (Sénia) but also a keen connoisseur of rice-growing landscapes. It is precisely a story that takes place directly, with a migrant disembarking from a small boat on a fine sandy beach, that opens the book. The sweetness of living, which is a collection that seems very consciously ordered, so that each piece is exactly where it belongs.

With a subtitle that says "True facts or almost", Núria Cadenes has managed to find the thread that connects the thirteen stories. that gives us In the flesh (Now Books, 2025). Cadenas does not cheat or involve herself in deceptive terminology: she presents the stories as what they are, free literary elaborations based on real events, which can be oral witnesses or historical studies or ancient or recent chronicles. There is a basis of reality, but the writer manipulates it and works it and serves it as a work of fiction. She has placed the stories in chronological order: first we read stories set in the Middle Ages (about the plague, about Artemisia Gentileschi, about princesses and novices), and we advance among bandits who jump the margins to wars of the 20th century (like the impressive story of the Italian fascist bombing of the city of Xàtiva), dictatorships from here and everywhere, to end the day before yesterday: the last story is inspired by the terrible effects of the DANA. Of all this, there is the exception that confirms the rule: a story entitled "The Dice" and that refers to the universe of Victor Catalan and the Empordà landscape. A dissident voice, says the author in the epilogue, where she explains the diverse origins of the materials: exactly what interests her, as an author, is giving a voice to those who oppose the movement. Allowing them to breathe, giving them a framework of words within which they become people and cease to be numbers or historical data.