"These days I am rereading the first attempt at a biography of Josep Maria de Sagarra (1894-1961). Unfortunately, our country still does not have a proper biography of the writer," explains the theater director Xavier Albertí. The book that has him captivated and that he recommends is Sagarra, seen by his intimates (Edhasa, 1982), which the journalist Lluís Permanyer (1939-2025) published four decades ago based on testimonies from people in the writer's closest circle. "Lluís Permanyer passed away recently, and I think we need to re-evaluate the work of documenting his personal relationship with Sagarra and everything he tells us about it. It is an essential book for understanding Sagarra's figure and work, and at the same time, for dispelling a great number of prejudices that this man carries with him," claims Albertí, who this summer has presented two shows at the Dansàneu festival.

"I saw her and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I don't remember how I explained my presence or my camera, but I do remember that she didn't ask me any questions." The photographer Dorothea Lange recalled in these words how she took her most famous photograph and one of the most iconic of the 20th century; Migrant Mother, a portrait of Florence Owens Thompson and three of her seven children. As can be seen in the exhibition dedicated to her by the XIV Xavier Miserachs Photography Biennial at the Bòbila Cultural Space in Palafrugell from this Sunday until October 18, this photograph is the culmination of how Lange progressively approached this woman, who was struggling to survive in a camp in Nipomo (California), while her husband and one of her children had gone to the city to have the car's radiator repaired so they could continue their journey. "There have been many women photographers, but unfortunately they are much less known than men. Dorothea Lange is an essential photographer in the history of photography," affirms the director of the Biennial, Maria Planas. "She worked with a Graflex camera, which was very heavy. She had polio when she was seven years old and managed to take all these photographs despite having mobility problems, which she concealed very well," says Planas.

Franco's censorship was implacable with Manuel de Pedrolo (1918-1990). The essay "Cartes de Catalunya", written in 1966 and described by censors as a text of "definitively separatist character" and "political propaganda with particular violence", was rejected by him up to three times. Comanegra recovered Cartes de Catalunya in 2025 and included it in the anthology Prosa de combat, which brings together some forty articles by Pedrolo published between 1964 and 1988, some of which are also unpublished. This anthology is the book recommended by Òscar Andreu, co-director of the program La competència on RAC1, presenter of Està passant on TV3, and author of Manual de defensa del català (Univers, 2026), the best-selling non-fiction book in Catalan on the last Sant Jordi.

Modest Cuixart, a founding member of the legendary Dau al Set group, is one of the key figures of the Catalan avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century. Often overshadowed by names like Joan Brossa or Antoni Tàpies, his contribution is equally decisive in the renewal of post-war plastic language. Born in Barcelona in 1925, but settled in Palafrugell since 1970, he developed a large part of his creative career surrounded and inspired by the landscapes of Empordà. This summer, coinciding with the centenary of his birth, the Espai Carmen Thyssen in the monastery of Sant Feliu de Guíxols dedicates the exhibition "Links, organized in collaboration with the Cuixart Foundation, which can be visited until October 18.

Actress Francesca Piñón was an introverted child. "Reading and cinema saved me. My childhood was spent reading and watching films," she says. As a child, she took refuge in reading, and it has accompanied her all her life. "At twelve, my grandfather made me read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky..., and I got used to that literature. It wasn't until adolescence that I discovered contemporary authors on my own. And now, with age, I've gone back," she explains. She defines herself as a "nineteenth-century" reader: her literary century is the 19th.

Little did Laura Autonell (Taradell, 1963) imagine when she started writing, convinced that her vocation would not extend beyond her immediate circle, that she would have to eat her words. "At the time, I thought: 'Which publisher will want me, if I have no literary career and I'm 62 years old?'", explains the writer. The path her second novel, The Bookstore of Dead Hours (Columna), has taken has shattered all her preconceptions. The book was published in May and quickly became one of the top 10 best-selling fiction titles in Catalonia. It hasn't left the list since. Columna has reissued it and put more than 5,000 copies into circulation, which have moved through the publishing market, mainly thanks to word-of-mouth.

The 50th edition of the Grec Festival will conclude this Friday with 144,714 spectators, approximately 16,000 more than in 2025, as reported this Thursday by the Councilor for Culture of the Barcelona City Council, Xavier Marcé, and the director of the Grec Festival, Leticia Martín. This Thursday and Friday will feature the last performances of this edition at the Montjuïc amphitheater, specifically the show "Um julgamento", starring Wagner Moura. As Martín assures, the main reason for the increase in audience is that there have been "more sessions at the Grec Theatre", which has a capacity of around 1,950 seats. The festival's average attendance has been 71%, 9% less than in 2025, a decrease that Martín attributes to the fact that this year there were "larger venues" such as the Teatre Apolo that were not fully occupied. This edition, over 200,000 tickets were put on sale, while last year it was 164,000.

“A simple man”. This is how Emily Wilson, the first woman to publish a complete translation of the Odyssey in English, defines the protagonist of Christopher Nolan's film. The philologist has railed against the film in an essay published in the London Review of Books under the title An uncomplicated man, referring to the first words Wilson used in her 2017 version to define Odysseus as a “complicated man”. During the promotion of the Odyssey (2026), Nolan cited Emily Wilson's translation on several occasions as one of his main sources of inspiration. Even so, the expert in classical literature and professor at the University of Pennsylvania has not been satisfied with the result.

The Palestinian writer Karim Kattan and the Tarragona-born poet and writer Pol Guasch met in Barcelona in May. Guasch then presented one of Kattan's two latest works translated into Spanish, L'Éden à l'aube (2024; El Edén al alba in the Txalaparta edition), which narrates a story of love and desire between two men traveling under a hurricane wind that buries Palestine under sand. Mutual admiration arose. Kattan has read Guasch's work, and what has fascinated him most is his poetry, specifically, La part del foc (Viena, 2021), which was awarded the López-Picó prize.

The actor Manolo Solo, one of the most versatile and solid performers in Spanish cinema, died this Thursday from cancer at the age of 62, according to the Spanish Film Academy. Solo won the Goya for best supporting actor in 2017 for the thrillerTarde para la ira, by Raúl Arévalo, and was also nominated as a supporting actor for El buen patrón, Cerrar los ojos and B, la película, and as a lead actor for Una finca portuguesa, for which he was also nominated for a Gaudí. A chameleon-like performer, he could disappear into his characters and navigate from comedy to drama with the security and solidity of gifted actors.

In the still innocent Marvel of the early 70s, a phenomenon unprecedented in superhero comics occurred in the Spiderman series: the protagonist grew up. Scriptwriter Gerry Conway, who had joined the series at just 19 years old, confronted Peter Parker with the complexity of adult relationships and the tragedy of the death of his first great love, Gwen Stacy. Over time, the publisher decided that growing characters wasn't good for business and could alienate readers: it was better to keep superheroes frozen in an eternal present and exploit their iconicity without deep changes that altered their essence. Well, in the new cinematic installment of the superhero, which arrived in theaters on Wednesday, something similar has happened: Spiderman has ceased to be that inexperienced and excitable teenager that Tony Stark recruited as a substitute for the Avengers and has become a sad and lonely young adult, tormented by the sacrifice he made at the end of "Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), when everyone, including his girlfriend, magically forgot about Peter Parker's existence.

Houses built or renovated with wood, earth, straw, or a wide variety of biological materials are proliferating in the Girona regions thanks to a unique ecosystem in Catalonia that brings together dissemination and training entities, architects, surveyors, and all kinds of sustainable construction professionals. It is a very well-connected network that helps, among many other things, to train self-builders, share experiences, resolve doubts, obtain labor, and find natural materials with a zero (or negative) carbon footprint.

Shaved and with short hair like a recruit, the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura almost goes unnoticed. The star of the series Narcos, nominated for an Oscar for his role to The secret agent, it is in Barcelona to finish this edition of the Grec Festival with A judgment [A trial], the show directed by Christiane Jatahy and written in collaboration with Moura himself and fellow actor Danilo Grangheia. The show, which can be seen this Thursday and Friday at the Teatre Grec, resumes the story of the protagonist of An enemy of the people, the doctor Thomas Stockmann, played by Moura himself. Two years after the end of Henrik Ibsen's play, the character returns to his city to demand a neutral process to prove his positions. On stage, this is realized by the fact that each night the character undergoes the judgment of eleven people who have registered before the performance and are randomly selected to form a jury.

The Irish singer Glen Hansard, who in 2007 won the Oscar for the song Falling Slowly –written for the soundtrack of the film Once–, has died at the age of 56 in a motorcycle accident in Lucan, west of Dublin, as reported by the BBC. Hansard was one of the protagonists of the film The Commitments (1991) and led his own rock band, The Frames, before triumphing with Once, starring Hansard himself and Markéta Irglová, who were also authors of the soundtrack as members of The Swell Season, a folk group that recorded three albums.

When it comes to choosing a lead writer, actress Anna Sahun doesn't hesitate for a moment: the Frenchman Emmanuel Carrère is one of the indispensable names in her library since she discovered him with L'adversari (Anagrama), originally published over twenty years ago. "It's a quick read, a very thin book, but you can't put it down," emphasizes the performer, who recalls discovering the French writer through her husband, actor and director Joel Joan. In L'adversari, which was adapted for the theatre in 2022, Carrère narrates the story of Jean-Claude Romand, a man who maintained a double life for eighteen years and who murdered his wife, children, and parents and attempted suicide when the truth was about to come out.

Kavinsky, one of the most international figures in French electronic music, known primarily for the massive success of his track Nightcall –included in the soundtrack of the film Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)–, has been found dead by the French police at his home in Paris, as reported by the French newspaper Le Parisien. Police are investigating the possibility that the death is a consequence of a stroke, as in preceding days the musician had suffered very intense headaches. Vincent Belorgey, his real name, was one of the stars of the closing ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games, where he performed a version of Nightcall with the French band Phoenix and the Belgian singer Angèle.

About the first canto of Mektoub, my love (2017) the shadow of the films weighs that Abdellatif Kechiche was premiered before and after, Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) and Mektoub: Intermezzo (2019). The mistreatment by the director that the actresses denounced and the review of the male gaze in the case of the first and the controversy surrounding the objectification of female bodies that accompanied the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival of the second make it difficult to discover this First song without the sexualization of female characters does not turn out to be uncomfortable. Especially since the film starts with a very explicit sex scene in which the uninhibitedness that could be commendable is clouded by how much more exposed the actress is than the actor. But the scene also places the protagonist, possibly alter ego of Kechiche, like this voyeur who observes more than practices sex while taking photos and dreams of becoming a filmmaker.

No one would say it when looking at one of its frames, but The Last Round in Venice is an adventure film. There is a journey, a romantic quest, and even buried treasure. But the action does not take place in exotic locations, but on secondary roads and not particularly bucolic towns in the plains surrounding Venice, and its protagonists are not intrepid explorers, but a couple of drunks who answer to the names of Carlobianchi and Doriano, and who have spent many years dodging the last hangover with the simple – but effective – method of always adding a drink after the theoretical final round.

"The sound of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra is unique in itself, and we must add to it the sonority of the theatre's pit where it usually plays," comments Katharina Wagner (Bayreuth, 1978), great-granddaughter of the composer of the tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung and controversial stage director, who has found a gap in her extremely tight schedule – the 150th edition of the Bayreuth Festival, which she currently directs, kicked off on July 24 – to visit the Palau de la Música Catalana, where she has presented the "exceptional" tour that will begin in Barcelona on August 29. This is a co-production between the Palau and the Peralada Festival, which this year celebrates its fortieth anniversary.

The Institute of Ilerdenc Studies (IEI) has incorporated this Tuesday the oldest piece in its library with the donation of the incunabulum Philosophia pauperum, printed in Lleida around the year 1485 by the typographer Enric Botel. The work, an extraordinary bibliographical rarity, becomes part of the legacy of the bibliophile Ramon Areny Batlle after his great-nephews, Maria Àngels and Àngel Boixareu Carrera, have ceded it to the institution.