Almost nine decades after being confiscated during the German occupation of France, a violin made in 1905 by the Caressa & Français house will sound again this Wednesday in Paris at a restitution ceremony for the descendants of its owner, thanks to researcher Pascale Bernheim and her long search for instruments looted by the Nazis.

A skyline of New York and, amidst the skyscrapers, a rose rises and a dragon rests on a rooftop. It is the image of a Saint George in the American city that serves as the background for her LinkedIn profile, since she does not have any image on WhatsApp. If the group Los Mismos sang about that physical bridge that would connect the Peninsula with Mallorca, Mary Ann Newman is also the main bridge, in this case metaphorical, that connects Catalan culture with New York.

Rosalía has been recognized with the National Award for Current Music granted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, endowed with 30,000 euros. According to the jury, the award for the artist from Sant Esteve Sesrovires is “for the artistic significance of the album Lux (2025), an ambitious, innovative, and transformative musical proposal, which elevates creative boundaries and has achieved unanimous recognition from critics and the public”. The jury also considers that Lux consolidates “a career of international scope characterized by research, risk, and creative evolution through the search for a unique sonic language that transcends genres, styles, and eras, and which reflects an enormous capacity to combine avant-garde and heritage”.

This month marks 800 years since the death of Saint Francis of Assisi. He passed away on October 3, 1226. He was 45 years old and practically blind. It is believed that the progressive loss of vision, and the tearing that affected him, which is reproduced in some paintings, was the result of a painful infectious disease: trachoma, which causes wounds on the surface of the eye and the cornea. He must have contracted it on his trip to Egypt in 1219. The visionary man who had sung to "brother Sun" was entering into darkness.

Martí Gironell returns to bookstores with Malaveïna, a new historical novel published by Columna that aims very high. The author from La Garrotxa leaves behind the adventures of the monks and choirboys of Montserrat from his last book to now immerse himself in the history of the gardens of the majestic Peralada castle, in the Empordà, which counts Antoni and Tomàs de Rocabertí had built in 1877. The novel, maintaining the thread of nature as a common denominator, connects the counts' gardens with the legendary character of the Malaveïna, a healer from the fields of Garriguella, a symbol of atavistic wisdom, who used flowers and plants to cure the sick of the region.

The Hollywood of the golden age has lost one of its last icons. Eva Marie Saint, who died at her home in Los Angeles at 97 years old from natural causes, was an actress of dramatic prominence and defiant beauty who worked with all the great names of her era: Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Newman, Elia Kazan, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck... A career that spans seven decades of film history but which shone especially in the 50s, when she debuted with On the Waterfront, a masterful face-to-face with Brando that earned her the Oscar, and also when in 1959 she starred with Cary Grant in Hitchcock's classic North by Northwest.

We are all strangers to one another. We all hide parts of our past; we deny what burns within us; we keep secrets, sometimes unconfessable ones. In the impossibility of being known and of knowing lies the mystery of human relationships, increasingly mediated and adulterated, certainly, but complex since the dawn of time.

For ten years now, at the beginning of autumn, Cadaqués has become a great exhibition stage for the best photographers in the world. This is possible thanks to the InCadaqués International Photography Festival, which organizes a host of exhibitions throughout galleries, gardens, beaches, and streets of this idyllic town of white houses at the foot of Cap de Creus. This year, in its tenth edition, from October 8 to 25, it will offer 25 exhibitions and workshops by 40 authors from 20 countries.

Although it takes place in the 17th century, Modern fairies, the first novel by the British author Clare Pollard (Bolton, 1978) that we can read in English thanks to Club Editor and the work of Yannick Garcia, is written from a radically contemporary perspective. Presented with more sense of humor and irreverence than the Hamnet of Maggie O'Farrell (L'Altra / Libros del Asteroide, 2021) and in a more credible tone than the torn-apart rereading of the Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë by Emerald Fennell, 2026, Pollard sends readers to the lavish Parisian salons in which writers such as Charles Perrault (1628-1703) and Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy (1652-1705) contributed to popularizing and redefining the fairy tales that, in many cases, had grown above all thanks to word of mouth among the rural population.

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.

This article is written using the Chronicle Text G1 font; you might not care about this fact, but there are numerous studies confirming that the font used affects how we respond to text. If so many studies have been and continue to be conducted on this subject, it is because the world remains very interested in knowing how to manipulate us without us noticing, how to get us to buy an anti-wrinkle cream or adopt an ideological position thanks to small details that the conscious mind overlooks, but which are morbidly perceived by the unconscious: the smell of stores, the color of signs, the typography of texts.

The WhatsApp photo looks like his portrait, but in reality, it is the cover of the illustrated album that adapts the story about ambition How Much Land Does a Man Need?, by Tolstoy (Ediciones Ekaré). Eduard Sola has just debuted in the novel with El niu (La Campana / Ediciones B) and has already delivered the script for Casa en cendres, the sequel to the phenomenon Casa en flames, which earned him a Gaudí and a Goya. He has established himself as one of the most sought-after screenwriters in the national audiovisual industry (he is behind titles such as Ravalejar, La casa nostra, Mi amiga Eva, Querer, La virgen roja), but he says he still doesn't have a little boat or a house on the Costa Brava.

Floatation Manual, the first novel by Jordi Marrón and winner of the 46th BBVA Sant Joan Prize, starts with a death to set a stalled life in motion. A woman returns to Portugal with her mother's ashes and, with them, to a summer of adolescence trapped in memory. Marrón avoids the more predictable path of solemn mourning and opts for humor, intrigue, and a protagonist who contemplates her own disaster from a distance.

"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.

Directed by Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor –who participated in the making of the Oscar-winningNo other land–, Naza dissects the death machine deployed by the Israeli army to perpetrate the Gaza genocide. The protagonists of the documentary are 24 soldiers who offer direct testimonies of a war campaign executed remotely using artificial intelligence systems. A chronicle of horror that is surprising for the coldness of the chroniclers, who seem detached from the human drama contained in their words. If in the poetic The Profession of Arms Ermanno Olmi illustrated the implications of the appearance of firearms at the beginning of the 16th century, Naza studies with clinical rigor the new martial paradigm in which human beings are reduced to numerical factors or erasable pixels on a digital screen.

The Project, Halley Records and Oques Grasses have decided to postpone the Osona band's first farewell concert from this Monday to Thursday. They announced it through social media at 2 PM, to avoid travel for the numerous people who intended to attend from outside of Barcelona, where mobility problems continue in various locations. Thus, the series of events for The last concert of Oques Grasses at the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium will begin on Wednesday.

Not Rosalía, nor Madonna, nor Charli XCX, which were three of the names that had circulated in the rumors. The headliners of the 25th edition of the Primavera Sound, which will take place at the Parc del Fòrum from June 2nd to 6th, are artists such as Phoebe Bridgers, Doechii, Hayley Williams, FKA Twigs, Robyn, Caroline Polachek and Bad Gyal, and groups such as Turnstile, Fontaines DC, The Chemical Brothers and Prospa, in addition to Massive Attack, the Bristol band that could not perform in the 2026 edition due to a downpour.

I have linked two readings that have rhymed within me like two verses of the same poem: Cosima, by Grazia Deledda, and The Fragile Lights of Earth, by Gabrielle Roy. These are memoirs by two writers who are apparently far apart in time and geography. I say apparently far apart because, as they are memories of their early years, and given that both wanted to be and were writers, their books have much in common and reading them one after the other has been a very interesting experience.

Suddenly it is as if Ivette Nadal (Granollers, 1988) had opened the window to pop. The singer-songwriter from the Vallès region has sought the complicity of Joan Pons (El Petit de Cal Eril) and Joan Colomo to produce And that will be all... (Halley Records, 2026), an album that arrives one year after Cada dos cels (2025), the record dedicated to the galactics Pau Riba and Jaume Sisa. Nadal, who lives with multiple sclerosis, has let in a breath of melodic freshness into her artistic world.