In a country that is both Catholic and priest-eater like ours, the relationship between religion and politics has historically been sinuous and critical. Polarization became very extreme during the Civil War, the echo of which continues to resonate. Vox-PP remind us of it every day. At the same time, there are surprising phenomena: we have, for example, a socialist president, Salvador Illa, who does not hide his Christian humanism in the midst of a society that is going in another direction, increasingly secularized and orphaned of meaning. And at the same time, we have an independentist far-right that banally warns about the dangers facing Christian civilization, whose values it does not practice.

It's a tradition that's gaining traction, the Estrella Damm Musical Sant Jordi, which this year coincides with the 150th anniversary of the brewing company. As usual, different spaces in the Old Estrella Damm Factory on Rosselló street in Barcelona will host about twenty concerts between 11:30 AM and 9 PM, featuring groups and artists of all kinds, such as Maria Jaume, Els Amics de les Arts, Buhos, Ven'nus, Naina, Xarim Aresté, Pastora, and Lildami.

A farm in some corner of rural Germany is the center of El sonido de la caída, the revelation film from Cannes 2025 that unfolds over four generations of inhabitants of this house. But Mascha Schilinski's second feature (much more ambitious than her opera primaDark Blue Girl) distances itself from the grand narrative sagas that explain the history of a country from the extensive particularity of a family. And not only because the major events that mark Germany of the last century are barely intuited or are only captured by how they indirectly affect the protagonists. Above all, because Schilinski places at the center the perspective of a series of female characters who have not usually starred in grand historical narratives to compose a film around female subjectivity, also understood as an intergenerational collective experience.

"Don't you have a smaller or thinner one, so it doesn't weigh too much to read in bed?" Beyond literary quality, book format, or other publishing specifics, a book's length can push us towards or against buying it. A study of 2,500 bestsellers from the New York Times revealed a few years ago that the average number of pages had grown from 320 in 1999 to 400 in 2014. Is there a similar pattern with books originally written in Catalan? If we take a look at almost 5,000 narrative and essay books originally published in Catalan in recent decades, the trend is confirmed: books in Catalan (including those released simultaneously in another language) are getting longer.

The dragon is one of the quintessential fantastic animals in the history of literature. Its power has fascinated millions of readers, young and old, spurred by the creativity of novelists and poets from all over, but the image it presents has been changing: the dragon can be menacing, dangerous, and violent, although also, on some occasions, benevolent and compassionate, and it can even possess a wisdom superior to that of humans. "I am fire. I am death," proclaims Smaug, the imposing and fearsome dragon against whom Bilbo Baggins must verbally contend in The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Never give up, and sooner or later you will find good luck," recommends Fulgor, the majestic white dragon, to the intrepid Atreyu in The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende. For Ursula K. Le Guin, who expanded and renewed the abilities of these enigmatic animals in the Earthsea novel cycle, dragons represent the human capacity to imagine: "If dragons frighten us it is because we tend to consider the works of imagination as suspicious or even despicable," the author defended in the article "Why Are We Afraid of Dragons, Americans?" (1974).

What better space to talk about Francesc Cambó (1876-1947) than the place that was his home? Specifically, his library, which remains intact, with all the shelves and all the books. This was the setting for a conversation between Borja de Riquer, the historian who knows the most about the factotum of the Lliga and his complex trajectory, and the deputy director of ARA, Ignasi Aragay.

Manel Gasch, abbot of Montserrat and president of the Pau Casals Foundation, has bypassed the usual thank you speeches. At the same time, he has eliminated the false modesty that often appears at award ceremonies. At the ceremony for the awarding of the

The Valencian publishing house Tirant lo Blanch, aimed at the university public, has a very interesting collection that mixes two seemingly distant concepts like cinema and law. The idea is apparently simple, but very effective in engaging readers looking for a more enjoyable way to approach issues that can be dry. The key is to find a legal expert willing to play along. Many have done so so far, and thus we find, for example, the criminal lawyer Jordi Nieva discussing democratic institutions based on John Ford's classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The latest addition to the publishing house is Joan Ridao, Professor of Constitutional Law at the UB and a lawyer in Parliament (and a former ERC leader), who tackles one of his specialities, the regulation of lobbies, based on the film Miss Sloane (2016), directed by John Madden and starring Jessica Chastain.

The images of the dragon reflect the creative audacity of artists in creating a fantastic figure, and the scenes of Saint George slaying the dragon that exalt the figure of the saint evoke the political struggles of his time. Saint George owes all his fame to the dragon. These are 10 emblematic dragons of Catalan Gothic, one of the most splendid historical moments in art.

A hundred shows in 58 venues in Barcelona will make up the program for the 50th Grec Festival, which will take place from June 29 to July 31. This year, the most important performing arts event in the Catalan capital is celebrating, and for this reason its director, Leticia Martín, has devised a program thinking about "how to make the present serve to read the past and imagine the future". The 2026 Grec "will not make the past a monument, but a tool" and will have "Montjuïc at its heart but will extend throughout the city", says Martín, who has promoted the creation of a festival archive to gather all the material from this half-century of life.

Last year, 11.3% of the books sold for Sant Jordi were comics. Graphic novels, children's comics, classics, comics journalism, literary adaptations... the offering is numerous and diverse. And if we narrow it down to Catalan comics, there are more and more: the variety of proposals and genres is unstoppable. The festival is one of the best moments of the year to stop by a bookstore and check it out.

Cédric Jimenez is fascinated by law enforcement. Or, more precisely, the faces behind them: their routines, their dedication, their noble fallibility. Until now, he had approached the issue from the codes of the expeditious policeman and with a certain claim to realism, to the point of presenting, in November, a spectacular recreation of the investigation after the Paris attacks of 2015. Zone 3 maintains the thematic motif, but changes the focus to look towards the day before yesterday's world: the French government, in addition to implementing a zone system that prevents residents of the banlieue from accessing the capital's city center, leaves surveillance and police investigations in the hands of an artificial intelligence from which it is almost impossible to escape.

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!"

The dragon can be terrifying, because it is an enormous creature capable of dominating all the forces of nature: earth, water, fire, and air. In the Babylonian poem Enuma Elix which was ritually performed during the Babylonian New Year festival, it is explained how the god Marduk defeats the sea goddess Tiamat, represented as a sea serpent and symbol of chaos. In Greek tradition, figures like Medusa or sea monsters also express this tension between order and chaos. Judeo-Christian tradition contributed greatly to the dragon's bad reputation: it turned it into the symbol of the enemy par excellence. In contrast, in China dragons have a benevolent character. There they embody the control of natural elements, are venerated in temples, and, in some dynasties, represented imperial power. In the Scandinavian world, dragons are not solely negative forces either, but are also associated with the sea, essential for the life and survival of the Vikings. They were seen both as a threat and a protection.

The libraries in the Barcelona region are starting a strike this Sant Jordi week. This Monday, workers from Barcelona's libraries will demonstrate from 6 p.m. at the Sarrià Library - J.V. Foix; Tuesday will already be a 24-hour strike; on Wednesday, April 22, they want to gather during the Sant Jordi opening speech in Plaça de Sant Miquel; on Thursday, Sant Jordi's day, they will demonstrate at Portal de l'Àngel, and there will also be performances on Friday coinciding with the municipal plenary session. From the 25th onwards, they will strike every Saturday indefinitely. This Saturday's call will be followed by both the centers of the Consortium of Libraries of Barcelona and those dependent on the Diputació de Barcelona, who agree in demanding better salary and working conditions.

The Catalan Book Chamber published this Monday the list of best-selling books in the week before Sant Jordi in fiction, non-fiction, and children's and young adult books, both in Catalan and Spanish. As usual, new releases are climbing to the top positions.

The Department of Culture maintains its pace of acquisitions for the National Collection: after the record figure of 5.1 million in investment in 2023, this Monday the minister Sònia Hernández Almodóvar presented 636 acquisitions totaling 344,881 works for an amount of 4,891,744 euros. Furthermore, 232 works were also incorporated through donation and 58 through dation. In terms of price, the most expensive purchase is the Forvm Photography Collection (902,680 euros, while part of it was a donation), which arrived at the Museu d'Art Modern de Tarragona a few weeks ago. Next is the Book of Hours of the Gralla Family (320,000 euros), deposited at the Biblioteca de Catalunya.

It was not exceptional for Roman-era mummies to be buried with papyri. This has been confirmed by the Oxirrhynchus Archaeological Mission, from the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies (IPOA) of the University of Barcelona, in the exhumations they have carried out in the Egyptian town of El-Bahnasa, ancient Oxirrhynchus. "They placed the papyri in the chest and pelvic area, under the wrapping, folded and sealed with clay, and they contained magical texts written in Greek," explains Maite Mascort, who directs, with Esther Pons, the archaeological mission that began in 1992. For the first time, however, a fragment of a literary text has appeared, Homer's "Iliad". It is not that the deceased was a lover of texts that explain the pain and anger of some of the protagonists of the Trojan War, but rather that the papyrus was reused. "A manuscript of the Iliad" was used to write the magical texts that used to accompany the deceased," assures Mascort.

What an intimate yet ambitious film. Inside it, it's as if various ways of understanding cinema are constantly stretching a rope, each in its own direction. From this tension is born a film that never shrinks. Based on the experiences of a Portuguese environmental engineer traveling for a project in Guinea-Bissau, The Laugh and the Razor touches on different themes always with a penetrating gaze, without wanting to do things halfway – perhaps that's why it lasts over three hours.

After the death of Franco in November 1975, Catalan culture experienced an urgent need to reclaim public space. And on Sant Jordi's Day in 1976, this became very clear. That year, the festival was experienced with great euphoria, even though the shadow of the dictatorship also made itself felt. “It seemed like a great day, that April 23rd. I come from the Civil Registry, where a friend will soon be able to change a Castilianized name for its native form; I see Catalan flags, Catalan books overflowing the stalls, the bust of Prat de la Riba returning to occupy a place at the corner of the Pati dels Tarongers of the Generalitat and, to top it all off, a new novelty, a Catalan newspaper, the first in 37 years, after an order erased our press from the map, along with the Statute and so many other things,” wrote the writer Manuel de Pedrolo, who also signed copies of his book Procés de contradicció suficient, published by Edicions 62.