The promissory note for a million pounds sterling, written by Mark Twain in 1893, is more than a humorous narrative about an extraordinary stroke of luck. Under the guise of a light and witty tale, Twain constructs a relentless critique against a society that confuses the value of people with that of the money they claim to possess. With incisive intelligence, he dissects the mechanisms of social prestige, the hypocrisy of the affluent classes, and the fragility of human judgments.The protagonist, an honest but ruined man, receives a miraculous object: an IOU for one million pounds sterling. The paradox is immediate: he has an immense fortune that, in fact, he cannot use. Twain thus reveals that the power of money lies not so much in its utility as in the perception it generates. No one checks if that stranger is really rich; it is enough that he appears to be for the treatment he receives to change radically. When a smile turns into discomfort

Humor becomes a critical weapon of extraordinary effectiveness. The situations often verge on the absurd, but behind each comic scene lies a severe denunciation. The reader laughs at the misunderstandings caused by the famous promissory note, but the smile soon turns to discomfort when they discover how plausible the characters' behavior turns out to be. The novel also offers a lucid reflection on identity. The protagonist does not undergo any essential transformation: he remains the same intelligent, prudent, and honest man. What changes is the gaze of others. This inversion of perspectives highlights that social identity is often a collective construction fueled by prejudices, interests, and conventions. The narrative style reinforces this critical view. The language is clear, lively, and of an apparent simplicity that hides an extraordinary satirical precision. Mark Twain shies away from any moralizing temptation and lets the facts themselves unmask the contradictions of the world he portrays. This expressive economy turns irony into a great engine of the narrative: the reader understands the inconsistency of their attitudes long before the characters do.One of the most remarkable aspects of the work is its relevance. Despite being written in the 19th century, it dialogues with a society in which image, status, and public projection continue to condition personal relationships. Today, as then, reputation is often built on the perception of success, rather than on the real worth of people. The Million Pound Bank Note is a brilliant satire that questions the moral foundations of a society fascinated by money. With elegant and devastating irony, Twain shows that wealth exerts an almost theatrical power: it shapes the perception of others, conditions opportunities, and alters human relationships. More than a century later, this fable continues to challenge us with surprising relevance.

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To show, of Paul Éluard (1895-1952), is a collection of prose poems, lectures, writings on art, and texts dedicated to his painter friends. Published in 1939, the title summarizes Éluard's aesthetic project: poetry should not describe the world, but reveal and transform it. The poet is not a passive observer, but someone capable of penetrating appearances and discovering hidden relationships between objects, beings, and feelings. Linked to the surrealism ofAndré Breton, Éluard evolves here towards a more human and communicative poetry. To show is a borderland work between dream and reality, between image and idea, between amorous intimacy and collective consciousness.The central theme is the gaze. For Éluard, to see is not just to perceive, but to understand. He reorganizes reality with unexpected associations, surprising metaphors, and free images. Everyday objects acquire a new symbolic force, and the boundaries between matter and emotion dissolve. Poetry regains the capacity to marvel and suggests that only those who know how to look poetically are truly free. This principle also structures the book: there is no linear narrative, but fragments guided by intuitions and sudden illuminations. An almost hypnotic fluidity

Writing is based on free surrealist association, but Éluard adds more lyricism to it than other authors of the movement. His metaphors do not seek hermeticism, but an immediate emotional truth. From this is born the extraordinary musicality of his poetry. The rhythm, repetitions, and sound variations create an almost hypnotic fluidity, as if dictated by an inner current deeper than ordinary logic. The language is both simple and mysterious. Love occupies a central place and becomes a force of universal transformation. The feminine figure acts as a mediator between the poet and the world: she is not only an object of desire, but also a revealing presence. Body, nature, light, and time merge into a deeper reality. The boundaries between subject and object disappear. Despite the lyrical dimension, the book reflects an ethical and political concern. In the European context of the 1930s, marked by fascism and the imminence of war, Éluard defends the freedom of the spirit and human dignity. Poetic freedom becomes a model for moral and political freedom. Éluard represents a point of balance between aesthetic experimentation and historical responsibility.Friend of painters like Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, or Man Ray, Éluard creates poems that function as verbal paintings, full of light, visual contrasts, and spatial forms. Éluard participates in the avant-garde search for a language capable of overcoming traditional divisions between artistic disciplines. Showing is essential to understanding Éluard and modern European poetry. The book remains alive because it raises questions about the gaze, the power of words, and the role of poetry in times of crisis. Éluard is clear: poetry is not an ornament or an escape, but a way to defend human freedom against everything that tries to diminish it.

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Henry and June is the intimate diary in which Anaïs Nin (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1903 - 1977, Los Angeles) narrates her relationship with Henry Miller and his mysterious wife, June Mansfield, in 1930s Paris. The volume includes material excluded from the original diary and previously unpublished. The text comes from diaries 32 and 36, titled June, The Possessed, Henry, Apotheosisand Fall and Diary of a Possessed Woman, written between October 1931 and October 1932. Anaïs Nin opens the doors to her inner world with unusual sincerity. The reader delves into an intense period of the author's life marked by convoluted emotional bonds and by an attraction that defies social and moral norms. But there may also be readers who come away from "Henry and June" with the feeling that they have followed the adulterous day-to-day life of a spoiled, narcissistic child, a victim of an Oedipal complex with no sense of personal ethics, who writes with an emotional overload that overflows, always disguised as a "virgin-prostitute" and a "perverse angel", as she calls herself. Living fully without falling into internal conflicts

The charm of Anaïs Nin is that, beyond recounting turbulent personal relationships, she constructs a narrative that delves into issues such as self-construction, the contradictions of desire and jealousy, and the role of women in a still restrictive cultural context. Nin does not shy away from showing hesitations, paradoxes, or vulnerability; on the contrary, she turns them into literary material, exploring the extent to which it is possible to live fully without falling into internal conflicts. From late 1931 to late 1932, Nin falls in love with the writings of Henry Miller and the surprising beauty of his wife June. When June leaves Paris for New York, Henry and Anaïs begin a passionate (and toxic) affair that sexually and morally liberates her, but also sabotages her own marriage to Hugo and she begins to take an interest in psychoanalysis. Anaïs Nin builds a visceral chronicle about the fragmentation of desire. The love triangle she explains in her "confidant", the diary, is not a geometric figure with equal sides, but an emotional labyrinth where identity blurs into the other. Miller represents artistic and carnal liberation. He is the mirror of the rawness that she, until then trapped in refinement, needed to write from truth. The attraction to June is almost mystical. Nin not only desires June, but desires to be June. She represents the wild, unattainable, and destructive femininity that fascinates and terrifies the author. Nin does not position herself in a passive vertex; she is the narrative center that manipulates and analyzes the tensions. The triangle serves to explore her own bisexuality and the capacity to love multiple versions of reality simultaneously.Anaïs Nin's style in Henry and June stands out for a writing rich in emotional nuances that combines psychological reflection and feminist sensibility. The writer filters the sordidness of relationships through an dreamlike language, transforming adultery into a religious quest for freedom. It also offers a vivid look at interwar Paris, at the restless and experimental artistic atmosphere, a time when creative freedom coexisted with deep insecurities. Published in 1986 (many years after it was written), Henry and June had a strong impact because it revealed a more intimate and daring facet of the author. The book can be read as a bold personal testimony and also as a key piece for understanding her literary and life journey.

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Writer, cartoonist, and professor of Sinophone literature, Wu Ming-Yi (Taoyuan, Taiwan, 1971) publishes a compendium of six short stories in which humans, nature, and technology invade other worlds and confirm their interdependence. Wu Ming-Yi's literature has been labeled magical realism for the way it seamlessly links human and non-human experiences. In this regard, The Land of Bitter Rain (Chronos) questions anthropocentrism and suggests that humans must learn to communicate through non-human and more effective languages and perspectives. Translated by Mireia Vargas-Urpí, the book features animal illustrations by the author himself.

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Ghost Stories, by Siri Hustvedt (Northfield, 1955), is not just a book about loss: it is also a work written from the room that absence leaves when a shared life is broken forever, a book capable of making grief a habitable place. The love letter that is Ghost Stories reflects on the disappearance of love with the clarity of one who knows that pain cannot be tamed with grand gestures, but rather settles into the tiny crevices of everyday life: in an empty chair, in an interrupted sentence, in the unexpected weight of an object that once meant nothing and that, suddenly, becomes a relic. The title is of excellent precision: the ghosts that haunt these pages are not literary specters in the classic sense, but persistent presences of memory, reverberations of an intimacy that resists disappearing. The love for her husband, the writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), is not a memory embellished by art, but a living matter that continues to breathe within loss. The great virtue of the book is its ability to turn intimacy into a universal experience without losing a shred of uniqueness. Hustvedt writes from the wound, but she does so with emotional intelligence, thus avoiding the temptation of grandiloquence or gratuitous melodrama: "I feel Paul's voice". The author's prose, precise and profound, advances with serenity, and analyzes in detail the mechanisms of memory, the traps of recollection, the way the past bursts into the present with devastating force. Every page seems written with the awareness that remembering is, at the same time, an act of love and a condemnation. The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the narrative. The voice of the author of Leviathan emerges as a form of continuity that crosses the text and turns it into a posthumous dialogue, into an interrupted conversation resumed by literature. There is a very deep emotion in this inclusion: the feeling that writing is the last place where two lives can continue to find each other. It is also remarkable how Hustvedt reflects on identity when the loving bond disappears. Who are we when the other, who had helped us define ourselves, is no longer there? What remains of the self after annihilation? These questions run through the book like an underground current and give it a philosophical density that goes far beyond personal chronicle. Grief is not just the loss of a loved one; it is also the loss of a version of oneself, of shared time, of an intimate language built in two voices.A stunning, elegant, and profoundly human book

Ghost Stories is a work of painful beauty, the kind that doesn't just explain an experience, but makes it resonate within the reader. Hustvedt demonstrates that great literature is capable of entering the most vulnerable areas of existence without simplifying them. The author writes a book about grief, yes, but above all she gives us a book about the persistence of love, about memory as a form of resistance, and about the word as a space where the dead continue to speak with us. Striking, elegant, and profoundly human, it leaves a mark that is difficult to erase.Beyond the strictly autobiographical dimension, Ghost Stories also reads as a profound meditation on the very nature of literature. Hustvedt seems to ask what writing can do in the face of the irreparable. Literature does not console in an easy sense, it does not heal or restore what has been lost, but it does offer a verbal architecture where pain can take shape. Writing is a way of not letting oneself be swallowed by the void. Each sentence seems to be sustained by this tension between silence and the need to speak, between the abyss of loss and the urgency of giving it a grammar. Hustvedt has written a marvelous book that is at once an elegy, an emotional essay, and a piece of memory, with a narrative maturity worthy of the great voices who know that the word is the only possible form of survival.

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The non-existent evil is a psychological and introspective work by the Italian writer Giulia Caminito (Rome, 1988). After winning the Campiello with an equally scathing and complex work, The lake water is never sweet (L’Altra, 2022), the author once again reveals herself as a keen but ruthless observer of society and the hidden and perverse mechanisms that silently permeate it. It is a slow infiltration, a discomfort that does not explode but festers. And it is here that the title becomes a trap: evil is not only present, but it manifests itself in its most contemporary form, the one we cannot name.

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Translated with excellence by Albert Nolla, Piercing is a first-class novel written by the Japanese filmmaker and writer Ryu Murakami (1952). In the prologue —titled 'You are a strange child, and when you grow up you will go mad'— Jordi Nopca describes the author as one of the great references of psychothriller, "a literary subgenre in which psychopaths have as much weight as their pursuers and victims". The story begins with a minuscule and domestic gesture —a father waking up at night beside his daughter Rie's crib— and, in a matter of lines, turns it into a scene of extreme anguish. What seemed like a moment of paternal vigilance in a Tokyo home becomes a nocturnal ritual governed by a fixed idea: the possibility of plunging an ice pick into the creature's flesh. He does not do it; but what matters is that he contemplates the idea with a chilling lucidity.

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Alice B. Sheldon (Chicago, 1915 - McLean, 1987) signed her books with the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.: she chose a generic name like James and took the surname Tiptree from a jam jar. Women than men They don't see It is a collection of twelve stories written between 1962 and 1973 that functions as a perfect trap: it seems like adventure science fiction, but in reality, it is a highly precise piece of ideological dissection. Sheldon doesn't imagine distant futures to escape the present, but rather uses them to make it intolerably visible, anticipating current debates on feminism, sex, and environmentalism.

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Blanca Busquets (Barcelona, ​​​​1961) proposes to Shared rooms A seemingly unassuming novel that operates with considerable emotional ambition: to explore what happens when lives and wounds overlap in intimate, physical, and symbolic spaces. The title is not merely a scenic reference, but a poetic and moral statement: sharing a room means acknowledging the presence of the other, but also exposing oneself, negotiating silences, and redefining boundaries. In fact, there are two rooms that play a central role on the trauma ward of the hospital where the story unfolds: 271, where Montserrat is, and 269, where Riqui lies. At first, when they pass each other in the corridor, they both think they know each other, but they can't place them. The mystery is set, and at this point, the novel takes on a subtle, almost comical, edge. thriller.

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The guardians of the houseShirley Ann Grau's (New Orleans, 1929–Kenner, 2020) novel operates with the discretion of something that knows it is explosive. Grau doesn't shout: she manages silence, restraint, and a sidelong glance because she trusts that the reader will understand that the true drama is not the conflict itself, but its normalization. And therein lies its literary power: the novel doesn't denounce, it exposes; it doesn't judge, it reveals.

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With Mr. Potter –translated into Catalan by Carme Geronès–, the writer Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean, 1949) constructs a powerful novel, a piece of incisive prose that makes lack—of affection, of words, of recognition—its creative engine. The book presents itself as the portrait of a seemingly irrelevant man, Roderick Potter, an illiterate taxi driver from Antigua, while simultaneously offering an impeccable dissection of the colonial, patriarchal, and affective structures that make this irrelevance possible. Kincaid doesn't rescue his character: he looks him straight in the eye, with a lucidity that is unsettling.

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A personal matter It is a short novel that offers the reader an intense picture of what the partisan resistance was like for Beppe Fenoglio (Alba, 1922 – Turin, 1963): a time of hypocrisy and contradictions, but also of genuine humanity. Drawing on his own experience as a partisan, Fenoglio also updates the narrative of the civil war in the Langhe region of Piedmont, an important theme in the literature of other Italians such as Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino.

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With Now, in November —a novel published in 1934 during the Great Depression—, author Josephine Johnson became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize. We read the story narrated by Marget, who tries to piece together her family's life from the time she was ten years old. We learn about the events that unfold from her perspective, and as she grows older, we get a glimpse of the increasing devastation wrought by the circumstances of the time.

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There are books that open like old wooden wardrobes, with creaking hinges, drawers where someone has left papers, fossils, yellowed letters, and drawings of whales made with squid ink. Anna Aguilar-Amat (1962) has written one of these books. Dead naturalists (Pagès, 2025), a delightful blend of genres that is simultaneously archive, initiatory journey, elegy, and homage to a naturalist legacy that lives both within and beyond the body.

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Read A match to the tongueThis collection of erotic poetry, edited by Nina Busquet and Anna Noguer, is a territory where desire is articulated not as metaphor, but as raw material. Every word is a risk in a world where censorship seems to be making a comeback. Eroticism appears stripped bare: it explodes and is contained, squeezed and refined, with that subtle tremor that precedes combustion.

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Mara Faye Lethem (New York, 1971) writes as if she were slicing open the tender—and often rotten—flesh of contemporary motherhood with a freshly sharpened knife. A translator into English of Albert Sánchez Piñol, Pol Guasch, Jaime Cabré, Jordi Nopca, and Max Besora, she now publishes her first novel in Catalan. Crazy series if you didn'tTranslated by Miriam Cano. It's a story that begins like a typical light comedy, full of nervous giggles, mothers in the park, and clueless fathers, but it soon reveals itself as a fierce satire, a scathing portrait of the fascist trap of perfection. The protagonist, Barbara, pregnant for the second time, navigates a suburban landscape that leads to organic yogurt and anxiety. All the mothers around her are impeccable, controlled, efficient; she, on the other hand, carries the feeling of being on the verge of exploding, both body and mind.

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What Maisie knew (1897) is a cult novel by Henry James (New York, 1843-London, 1916) which analyzes a corrupt, immoral, and hypocritical Victorian English society through the lens of the protagonist's parents: the selfish Ida and the vain Beale. They are the negligent parents of little Maisie, who will have to suffer the bitter divorce and the dire consequences of this traumatic separation.

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Come on, the new novel by Jon Fosse, Nobel Prize winner for Literature 2023, immerses the reader in an atmosphere of introspection and silence, thanks to the writer's ability to construct a universe where time seems to stop and each moment dissolves into a spiral of sordid and delicate emotions at the same time. With this contemplative essence, the novel insists that life is a constant back and forth between presence and absence, between love and betrayal, and that in the end everyone is looking for a space where they can be accepted as they are, without masks or disguises.

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Howard Fast (1914-2003) wrote Spartacus in 1951 from prison. He was serving a sentence for refusing to reveal information about his comrades in the Anti-Fascist Refugee Aid Committee during the Civil War. Thanks to the publisher L'Agulla Daurada and translator Lola Fígols, we can now read the novel in Catalan for the first time. A book that, despite its 450 pages, resonates with us thanks to (or because of) the film adaptation made by Stanley Kubrick in 1960, which we've been reading every week.

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The narrative proposal of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria, 1977) stands out for moving away from the clichés about what contemporary African literature should be and avoiding what has been called pornography of poverty, a label the author has always treated with irony. Chimamanda Ngozi's protagonists are strong, independent, and well-positioned women who assert their right to be women in a chaotic world. And they have hopes, dreams, memories, and contradictions. This is the case with the four protagonists of her latest novel, The dream counter, a volume of almost 600 pages written over a decade—during which she has worked on memoirs, children's literature, feminist manifestos, and a public lecture on freedom of expression—and translated into Catalan by Anna Puente.

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