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 The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the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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The birthday, by Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975), is a story somewhere between a novel and autofiction that deals with the liberation of a man who dismantles the totalitarianism of the most important institution: the family. And it is even more commendable that the author is Italian and has the courage to break the taboo of the family, a concept that is nothing more than a hypocritical social convention like all formalities.

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Wollstonecraft. The beginning is always today, by Ricard Ruiz Garzón (Barcelona, 1973), is an adventure novel, a fictionalized biography of an exceptional woman of her time, and a recreation of Scandinavian legends of a fantastic nature. In the midst of the French Revolution, specifically in 1795, the writer, philosopher, and pioneer of feminism Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) traveled to Scandinavian lands to find a smuggling ship loaded with silver owned by her daughter's father, the merchant and diplomat Gilbert Imlay.

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The five essays that make up Why do some men hate women? have been written over the course of more than half a century of the career of writer Vivian Gornick (Bronx, New York, 1935). An illustrated New Yorker, chronicler of intimacy and nonagenarian feminist with clear references such as Natalia Ginzburg, the author believes that the only way for romantic love to succeed is to accept the other person in their entirety, beyond any sexual potential they may have. The choice of texts that make up Why do some men hate women? explores the lives and artistic careers of writers such as Joan Didion, Paula Fox or Margaret Drabble, and also writers such as Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer, staunch misogynists. In parallel, Gornick reflects on 1970s feminism in the United States, its connection to literary matters, the complex task of making a name for oneself in the intellectual field of that time, friendship between women, the art of writing stories, and letter writing.

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Teresa or the love life of a woman, published in 1932 in Llibreria Catalònia – the same year it appears Am I an honest woman? of Mercè Rodoreda, where one of the three narrators is also named Teresa–, was the only novel written by Carme Montoriol i Puig (1892–1966), a versatile author who was widely recognized in her time but who, until very recently, has been almost forgotten by the most canonical historiography. in the novel, and now Adesiara contributes another with a luminous and extensive introduction by Neus Real and cover by Francesc Vayreda. She was a complete artist ahead of her time, a successful pianist and playwright, the first translator of the Sonnets by Shakespeare in 1928, committed to the cause of the Republic and an activist in the feminist struggle of the 1930s.

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