This is a somewhat surprising story, especially considering it was written by a woman. I don't know much about Amy Twigg: what the book flap says is all that can be found about her online: that she is English – and seems quite young (her age is not stated anywhere) – that she studied creative writing and that with Rotten Creatures she won the BPA Pitch Prize and caused quite a stir. It is a story that begins in a, let's say, inadvertently routine way. Iris (thirty-two years old) decides to enter a women's commune –the House of the Left— to see if her precarious life reality improves. She does so, attracted by one of the residents in the house, the mysterious Hazel. At the head of the domestic matriarchy is Blythe, a vigorous and decisive woman.The profile of those who were welcomed there can be imagined: “Not all of them were fleeing violence. There were women who came because they were exhausted from the eight-hour workday, from working to pay for a house where they barely lived and from promotions that never came. Women tired of frustrating dates and of heating meals in the microwave, of receiving unsolicited dick pics and of traffic jams. Of fiddling with their keys when they returned home and it was dark, of covering their drink with their hand so that nothing would be put in it, of not drinking a sip because the waiter had given them a bad vibe”.A safe space for women?

So far everything is in order. The House of the Left seems like one of those safe spaces for women, where they can exercise sorority with freedom and joy. But no. What will happen, and is announced in the text almost immediately, is unexpected. We could say that the novel begins like Terra d’elles and ends like The Lord of the Flies. Herland (Herland) is a science fiction utopia by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It deals with a society inhabited solely by women where order, peace, and rationality prevail. This gynaecotopia presents a cooperative collectivity in which competitive relationships have been transformed into relationships of solidarity. Somewhere in South America, three million Amazons live happily in cooperation and communion with nature. They reproduce by parthenogenesis and have managed to conceive only daughters. Their religion is maternal pantheism. A motherhood that is transversal to society, influencing all arts and industries, absolutely protecting all children and providing them with the most perfect care and education. Herland is the second volume of a trilogy and was originally published in 1915. It was translated by Jordi Vidal and published in Catalan in 2002.The Lord of the Flies, in turn,is a more well-known novel. It was published in 1954 by William Golding, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It deals with a group of young British boys stranded on a desert island who try to self-govern with chilling results. It is a fable about the innate drives of violence in the individual that made a fortune (the volume was translated by Manuel de Pedrolo and published in Catalan in 1966).Well then, everything that happens in the supposedly ideal space of the House of the Left will reveal the contradictions of human nature (male and female alike). The love story of Iris with Hazel (the left of the story) will evolve, but so will, for the worse, the relationships between the resident women and Blythe's own moods. The male intervention, however, does not help, but rather precipitates events.Do not reveal anything if I write that things will end badly, as the narrator repeatedly warns us. What seemed like a feminist parable ends up becoming her nemesis. But Amy Tigg's narrative flow flows so smoothly and so well-oiled that we fall into it without realizing it. And so passes the glory of the world (and of women).

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Five years after his last published diary, I don't know what dies (Affairs, 2021), Ramon Ramon (Catarroja, 1970) once again makes public pages from his private notebook. He is a writer of the null days without linewhich is the only valid program, but it spaces out the moments for editing its pages. It debuted in 2014 with Within the grass field (diary 2009-2012). At that moment I already noted his polished and supple prose. An example: "Coming along the highway, the copper light of the valleys and mountains of Maestrat has enveloped us like sunflowers. Even a very nearsighted person like me could make out the leafy details of vineyards and olive groves. The most poetic green, in these lands, is the one painted by the plow (…).

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Intruder in the dust It is not usually included among the handful of masterpieces of William Faulkner (1897-1962) However, upon closer inspection, it is an excellent novel with great literary strength. We could even consider it a very suitable title for readers who want to delve into the author's universe for the first time. It is also one of his works with the most evident anti-racist commitment. This is a noteworthy fact, especially considering that it was published in 1948, several decades before the civil rights movement took center stage in the United States.

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I still remember perfectly, twenty years ago, the impression that reading made on me French suiteby Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942). As always, I took it. This ironic, intelligent, meticulous, multilingual, and highly cultured woman did not deserve to die (if anyone did). deserves (to die), but she was murdered on August 17, 1942, in Birkenau. Three months later, her husband, Michel Epstein, would vanish from the same chimneys. They were Jewish. They had been born in Russia, fled the Bolsheviks, settled in France, and converted to Catholicism. But for the Nazis, they were simply "Jews."

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Joan Baptista Peset Aleixandre was a prestigious Valencian doctor, professor of legal medicine and rector of the University of Valencia, shot by the Franco regime in May 1941. He came from a brilliant liberal lineage of Valencian doctors and intellectuals (his father was one of the honorary presidents of the First Congress of Doctors, Popular Front in the 1936 elections, integrated into the party of Manuel Azaña, Republican Left).

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Continuing the series of publications on the artistic and literary significance of the world of wine, Vibop Edicions provides us with a pamphlet by Enric Satué on the presence of wine and other spirits in the history of art.

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"Food is love. People keep saying it, I hear it more and more often, and I know it's true. But for me it also meant that love was eating." With these words begins one of the most peculiar books of the season, Bread and milkThe author, Karolina Ramqvist (Gothenburg, 1976), is a Swedish writer whose books address themes such as female identity, motherhood, and family relationships. It was obvious, then, that at some point she would have to address the topic of home cooking.

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We know Vanessa Springora on the impact of her first book, Consent (published in French in 2020 and in Catalan in 2021). The volume narrates her seduction by the writer Gabriel Matzneff when she was a teenager. She was in love, her mother consented to the relationship (hence the title), and he was a known pedophilia propagandist. In the absence of her father, living with her estranged mother, Springora fell prey to a collector of young girls—and young boys—who didn't hesitate to turn many of her literary works into apologetics for pedophilia.

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Amadeu Fabregat was, in the 1970s, a pioneer of Catalan literature in the Valencian Community. Two of his titles are legendary: Fresh Meat: Young Valencian Poetry and the novel –or whatever it was– Rehearsal for the approach to "Fallas Folles Fetes Foc"With these two depth charges—especially the second, which won the Andròmina de Octubre Prize—Fabregat made a name for himself in Valencia at the end of the Franco regime, where all aesthetic daring, all political extremism, and all cultural snobbery were lavishly celebrated.

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Kindness, austerity, trust, perseverance, loyalty, honesty, solidarity, realism. The family—the extended family of the title—of the narrator of Antònia Carré-Pons's new novel, Montserrat Vidal, owns a delicatessen, and these are the values—the values of a shopkeeper—that she learns.

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This book is part of a long tradition of autobiographies by what are now called "sex workers." And it is being published now, just as the publication ofStory of my eight sins, by Lea Ferrer (pseudonym). Both volumes are among those offered on Amazon under the heading Real facts.

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There has been a lot of literature – or meta-literature – about the process of writing a book. These writers suffer for every sentence, drunk or drugged, secreting an infinite pain in having to produce a text with the doses of originality or at least formal gravity and drama that justify their herculean effort. Dick or the sadness of sex, instead, I imagine its author, Kiko Amat, having a great time with his writing. Because although what is addressed is an outrageously traumatic sexual experience, the author's intention and the resources he puts at his service are still completely humorous.

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