On October 15, 1940, at 6:30 in the morning, 86 years ago today, at the Santa Eulàlia moat, a firing squad killed President Lluís Companys. On November 8, 1940, three weeks after the assassination of Companys by order of General Franco, the government of the Republic of Mexico sent its heartfelt condolences to his widow, Carme Ballester. This is demonstrated by a letter, hitherto unpublished, which the Associació Memòria i Història de Manresa is publishing this Thursday. In the missive, the secretary of the Mexican legation in Paris, Bernardo Reyes, expressed to her a message of solidarity and recognition:

Hollywood has made multiple versions about Billy the Kid: from King Vidor's 1930 one to Sam Peckinpah's 1973 one, without forgetting the interpretation Paul Newman gave in 1958. But the surgical gaze of the French writer Éric Vuillard (Lyon, 1968) shows another type of violence, far removed from any romanticism. After narrating the French Revolution from the point of view of the people on the street in 14 July (2016), and unmasking the great economic powers that made possible the rise of Nazism in The Order of the Day (Goncourt Prize 2017), Vuillard returns to put the magnifying glass on the dirty laundry of power in The Desperate Ones. A History of Billy the Kid (Edicions 62 / Tusquets), with a Catalan translation by Jordi Martín Lloret.

In the Spanish state there are still thousands of people searching for their relatives buried in mass graves. The historian Arnau Fernández Pasalodos (Barcelona, 1995) has interviewed great-grandchildren of those murdered and explains his own story and his complaint to the Huesca courts in the book Did your great-grandfather kill mine? How the trauma of the Civil War and Francoism has spanned four generations (Crítica). Because the trauma of the war reaches the fourth generation.

Getting an interview with Shakira is not easy at all, and Thursday's episode of La revuelta, on RTVE, was proof of that. According to David Broncano's team, they received confirmation of the meeting with only one day's notice and an appointment at 5 p.m. at Macondo Park, the Madrid complex where the artist holds her concerts. Without time to prepare a set or a conventional setup, always according to La revuelta, the presenter, who decided to show the whole process, grabbed a sandwich, a bottle of water, and a small team to head to the venue.

Alicia Giménez Bartlett (Almansa, 1951), the great lady of crime fiction, returns with a new intrigue starring the iconic inspector Petra Delicado. She, who is one of the first female police officers in Spanish literature, having been born in the pages of Ritos de muerte (1996) thirty years ago now, faces grief and the power of the Church in Bajo el cielo infernal (Destino).

Taking a trip back in time, landing on a night fifty thousand years ago in a rock shelter in the current municipality of Capellades (Anoia) and observing how a score of Neanderthals live and sleep requires imagination, but archaeology can help a lot. And the Abric Romaní in Capellades is an exceptional setting for doing so, because during forty years of research it has been possible to study Neanderthal occupations from approximately 62,000 to 40,000 years ago. That is to say, more than 20,000 years of prehistory.

The Black Ball has demonstrated the Javis' ability to connect with mainstream audiences on topics that until recently were quite marginal. The film's phenomenon goes beyond the award at Cannes and the audience awards at the Toronto and San Sebastian festivals: it attracts audiences in droves to theaters. It debuted with 4.7 million euros in its first three days and more than 610,000 viewers, exceptional figures. In two weeks it has reached 2 million viewers and almost 15 million euros in box office revenue.

"Suspense can be synonymous with hope," reflects Basque writer Katixa Agirre (Vitoria, 1981). The reader who delves into the pages of her new novel, Internal Service (La Segona Perifèria/Tusquets), translated from Basque to Catalan by Pau Joan Hernández, knows perfectly well that the story does not end well, but the four protagonists trust until the very last moment in a good ending. They are Bittori Etxeberria, Delia Lauroba, Itziar Mujika, and Tere Verdes, who risked everything to help imprisoned comrades, support the Basque Government in exile, and stand up to Francoism. Together with other agents, they wove one of the most effective espionage and evasion structures in the north of the Iberian Peninsula: the Álaba network. They did so in a context of terror, because by mid-1937, the Basque Country had been massacred from the air, the coup plotters had occupied it, and the government of Lehendakari José Antonio Aguirre had gone into exile.

Will we be able to see the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, the deputy Gabriel Rufián or the former mayor Ada Colau spending the night in a nine-square-meter house equipped with a kitchenette and a microwave but without a bathroom or running water? This has been the surprising announcement of an exhibition, "sponsored by Ikea", at La Capella in Barcelona, where, according to the photographer and artist Joan Fontcuberta, public figures, even Maricarmen Abascal, would be invited to spend the night. But you certainly won't see it, because it is all a lie. This Monday, during the press conference for the presentation of the eighth edition of the Festival Clàssics –dedicated this year to the lie–, Fontcuberta, the conceptual patron of the event, played at setting traps for the journalists, from the very first minute, to demonstrate the fragility of truth. The lie made sense, then, within the theoretical framework of the festival.

Until a few days ago, the only trace of Gallic Lutetia was the accounts of Julius Caesar in his work The Gallic Wars. The Roman general explains there that in 53 BC he convened a general assembly of the peoples of Gaul in the Lutetia of the Parisii. At that time, Rome was facing Vercingetorix, the young Gaul who had convinced his fellow countrymen to burn their own cities and crops to leave the Roman troops without food or supplies. The negotiations must not have gone very well, because just a year later, in 52 BC, Caesar's lieutenant, Titus Labienus, confronted the Parisii in Lutetia, and the latter set fire to their own fortification to prevent it from falling into Roman hands. Since then, there has been much debate about where in Paris the famous Gallic town was located.

Gonzalo Suárez (Oviedo, 1934-2026) has died at 92, leaving behind one of the most singular trajectories in Spanish cinema of recent decades. The Asturian writer, journalist, and film director was recognized with the 2026 Honorary Goya for his ability to experiment with all genres and transgress the limits of conventional narrative. “I am very happy with this award because it covers my entire body of work, although I regret that it does not catch me making films. I would like to say action and cut again because cinema is action,” said this multifaceted professional when he received the Goya in Barcelona.

The brutal death of two women, murdered by their husbands, triggered a mechanism in the mind of journalist and writer Nathacha Appanah (Mahébourg, Mauritius, 1973). She decided to silence the murderers, stand by the victims, and tell her own story as well. In The Night at the Heart (Angle/ADN), translated from French into Catalan by Andreu Gomila, the writer weaves together the three stories to confront the ghosts, to not let anyone erase who these women were, and to reflect on a society where femicides are all too frequent.

After having two children very close together and finding herself locked at home with COVID-19, Evelina Johansson, a professor of gender studies at Örebro University (Sweden) and a specialist in Marxism and feminist theory, reached her breaking point. "I was having a very hard time, overwhelmed and very tired," she recalls. Looking for a way out of the tunnel, she began reading and researching the role of the home in society and delving into literature on the abolition of the family. This school of thought does not advocate ending love, affection, or cohabitation, but rather opposes the privatization of care and the dependency, sometimes somewhat forced, on a small unit, the family, in order to survive. It advocates for a world where everyone has access to an unconditional and collective network of support, food, and shelter, regardless of who you were born to.

When someone does something as cruel as taking a plane to go and be a weekend sniper and dedicate themselves to killing children, young girls, or the elderly, the first reaction is disbelief. Then come the questions. Why? Who was organizing it? Who were these macabre tourists? What drove them to go "hunting" for defenseless and vulnerable people? How is it that no one saw it, or why did people look the other way?

"What can we do? How can we act? How do we invite action?" These are some of the questions asked during the presentation of the Biennial of Thought, which for ten years now—this being its fifth edition—has turned Barcelona's public squares into a place for debate and reflection. In an increasingly dark world, ideas are more welcome than ever, and this year the reflections do not aim to be nostalgic or apocalyptic, but rather aspire to focus on the present with the motto "Unleashing the present".

Going back after a very long life and, therefore, seeing everything through the eyes of experience. It is the opportunity offered to Wilbur Budd, who owns a bookstore empire but is very lonely. Budd is the protagonist of the new novel by the British author Matt Haig (Sheffield, 1975), The Midnight Train (Empúries/ADN), translated into Catalan by Esther Roig Giménez. Haig has published more than twenty books and achieved international success with The Midnight Library (2020), with more than 10 million copies sold. Now he returns to using fantastic elements to talk about the possibilities that life offers us and to delve into one of his favorite themes: how to get out of the pit.

The conservation of farmhouses, churches, and historic houses in the towns and cities of Catalonia will have, for the first time, a specific fund. This was announced this Saturday by the Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, who detailed that this fund will be used to preserve local architectural heritage, designed jointly with the Department of Economy and Finance, and will be launched throughout this legislative term.

"Literature serves to say that, for the racist and unsympathetic piece of shit country that we are being left with, demographic replacement is welcome. It's already late!", said Biel Mesquida this Saturday during the inauguration of the 44th Catalan Book Week.The poet and writer, born in Castelló de la Plana in 1947, has spent decades defending freedom in all its nuances, and today his message has also claimed “insurrection”: "I have not come to bring you peace, but struggle; I have not come to bring you well-being, but insurrection. Literature has always been on the front line of humanizing struggles, against the trampling of rights, against ignorance, for wisdom, and for the practice of people's happiness", asserted the poet, who also sang a cappella the first stanza of Bella Ciao.

"What would happen if we lost the ability to love one another, to help each other selflessly, to touch each other, to raise our children, to feel pity for others?", asks Ada Castells (Barcelona, 1968). The writer has imagined a technified world where machines do everything, even when it comes to giving birth: clamps hold the mother's body, and once the creature is expelled, she doesn't even touch it. Obviously, these are pregnancies where sex plays no role. The baby goes directly to a nursery zone, where machines will raise it. Sílvia, the protagonist of the novel The Anthropologist (Edicions 62), turns everything upside down when her daughter, Maria, is born: she decides to trick the machine and keep the girl. From there, all kinds of doubts and a rebellion arise.

"All roads lead to Rome" is an expression that has been used to speak about geography, religion, or as a popular saying to mean that there are different ways that lead to the same result. However, science has just debunked this myth. Research led by the archaeology team at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) has shown that the Roman Empire's mobility network did not have the capital as the center of the world.