First weekend of October in sight, and with a lot of proposals to enjoy as a family. As always, we have prepared a selection of activities for you to do with your children on October 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, such as eating cookies in Camprodon, drawing a more sustainable future at the Education for Sustainability Festival, or experiencing Toca Festa, the family day at L’Auditori that seeks to bring music closer to everyone through a participatory, playful, and open experience.

The international Spanish-language book business will look towards Barcelona once again for Liber 2026. The fair, which will be held from September 29th to October 1st at the Gran Via venue, will open new commercial opportunities in emerging markets and will focus on boosting the growth of publishing rights sales and sector debate.

This weekend is full of cultural and family leisure activities. As always, we have prepared a selection of activities for you to do with your children on September 25th, 26th, and 27th, such as continuing to attend the most family-friendly activities of La Mercè, enjoying the cultural proposals of the Rubió Performing Arts Festival, or exploring your most creative side at Art-Action!, the annual day of artistic experimentation at the Girona Museum.

I am watching a video by a professional organizer. With new technologies, helping to tidy and organize is a profession. And I have no doubt that it is necessary. Whoever does not have a tidy kitchen cannot cook well. The desk where you study is your brain (and no, saying “Then, if it were empty, would my brain be empty?” doesn't count). I know that having a place for everything is necessary for peace of mind.

In a few days we enter autumn, although climate change has been altering the seasons for some time now. Since it looks like it will be sunny this weekend, we have prepared a selection of activities for you to do with your sons and daughters on September 18th, 19th, and 20th, such as taking a stroll through the Week of the Book in Catalan, enjoying the return of the Festa al Cel in Salou, watching birds at the Delta Birding Festival at Món Natura Delta, or awakening artistic creation at the Pluja d'Art Fair in Sant Jordi Desvalls.

The week ahead, with Jordi Garrigós

Some of the things we hope not to miss in the next seven days

I will listen to Charli XCX's new album. Music, fashion, film is the eighth album by the British pop star and a new, more rock-oriented turn in her prolific career. After dominating with the Brat summer, Charli Aitchison abandons green and embraces black and white to remain almost the only singer of her generation who plays with the mainstream while navigating the margins and experimentation. A singer who is living her particular artistic zenith, having more fun than anyone.

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First days of school and a long weekend in sight. That is why we have prepared a good collection of activities for the coming days, such as attending FiraTàrrega, where you will be able to see 57 shows by local and international companies; enjoying La Terrasseta in Tarragona, an independent festival with musical and contemporary circus proposals; listening to and reading stories at the 16th edition of the Medinyà Story Fair, and delving into Gaudí's imagination by visiting La Pedrera - Casa Milà, among others.

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The week ahead, with Jordi Garrigós

Some of the things we hope not to miss in the next seven days

I will finish McCartney: the hunt for the lost bass, about the mysterious disappearance and recovery of Paul McCartney's first bass, a Höfner 500/1 bought in Hamburg in 1961 for only 30 pounds. This marvel sounded on the original recordings of Love me do, she loves you and the early Beatles classics. A road movie musical about the greatest pop group of all time.

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The art of not complicating life. The title of the book by writer and essayist Alexis Racionero, although not what he initially intended, is a whole declaration of intent of what we find in this editorial proposal published by Arpa. An essay that deals with the importance of simplifying life and living with more authenticity and serenity. It delves into the main philosophical and cultural practices of the East and West in search of guidelines that allow fostering disaffection and betting on presence and austerity to achieve greater happiness and well-being.

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The Tarragona-based journalist Enric Garcia Jardí (1992) wrote a report a couple of years ago in Ara Diumenge about the maquis fighter Joan Busquets Verges, born in Barcelona in 1928. Busquets was arrested by the Civil Guard and spent twenty years in prison after his death sentence was commuted. After weeks of living with the former guerrilla fighter in his Normandy home, the Tarragona-based journalist has published the book El maqui que encara lluita, in which he reviews the long life of this anarchist fighter who still visits Catalonia from time to time.

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We live in an era marked by immediacy. We answer messages while walking, constantly check notifications, and often end the day feeling like we've been busy all the time without really connecting with ourselves. Speed, hyperproductivity, and the need to always respond immediately are part of a culture that leaves less and less room for emotional rest. Gaby Hostnik, a specialist and trainer in applied neuroscience and emotional intelligence, author of the book The future is what you do today (Bruguera, 2026), talks about this contemporary malaise.

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Sant Jordi has once again overflowed Catalonia with the magic formula that never fails: books for all tastes —from the exquisite Nobel laureate Han Kang to young authors in love with success, such as Gil Pratsobrerroca, David Uclés and Inma Rubiales—, roses at prices ranging from 4 to 25 euros, and the contagious enthusiasm of millions of citizens who have taken to the streets ready to have a good time.

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There are people who buy a book for Sant Jordi to give to someone who never reads any books, which is like me being given a ticket to go see Formula 1. There are people who lament that there are people who buy books for Sant Jordi who then don't read them. But how many of us don't have books from previous years piling up that we haven't opened yet? There are people who want the celebration to be perfect. But perfection is a theoretical concept.

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How many lives can a book have? In Celrà, straddling Girona and Empordà, for 16 years a recycled reading project has been beating, giving a new life to more than 300,000 books. It shares space with the town library in the old Pagans Factory, a gem of Catalan industrial modernism converted into a municipal space, where the Town Hall coexists with the municipal swimming pools, the library, the music school, art school, and a civic center with a bar and restaurant, and a free indoor play area for children and babies.

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The definitive impulse to start writing, a self-confidence therapy, the stimulus to tell that story that is kept in a corner of the soul or a creative activity for an active retirement. The students of the Vicenç Pagès Jordà Writing Room of the Girona City Council are as diverse and heterogeneous as the motivations that have led them to want to write. But all of them, despite their different origins, ages or abilities, are touched by the same passion for writing. And for reading! Since the founder of the school, the late writer from Figueres Vicenç Pagès, did not conceive of one activity without the other.

]]> This Saturday I had the good fortune to see in Lloret de Mar I count every step I take on the ground, a monologue that Lluïsa Cunillé wrote especially for the actor Oriol Genís, directed by Xavier Albertí. The play is of a delicacy that we only find at the highest levels of art, performed by three top personalities of Catalan theatre. I am very grateful for the idea of a Xavier Albertí cycle in Lloret, his city, and I hope more towns would program theatre with this ambition.Now that it is Saint George's Day, few people will buy theatre books, even though theatre is perhaps, together with poetry, also little sold, the most rigorous form of literature. What can we do if culture (which in Latin means cultivation) involves burying and watering a seed that is not seen but is there, and with much more life inside than the plants already grown and ready to be consumed. Theatre has given us tragedy, the most essential form of human consciousness.And, therefore, few people will buy, and I'm sorry, a recent book from Arola Editors (an editorial harmed by the scandal of denied subsidies for Catalan books, but with an impressive catalog, of incalculable importance for our theatre),  Ansietats teatrals reunides, by Esteve Miralles.

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"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.

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Sant Jordi's Day. As is tradition, the streets of Catalonia become a hive of books, roses, and senyeras. And, in the midst of the great celebration of reading, a genre that tries to make a space for itself is politics: leaders often swap the lectern for the pen to fix their narrative or explain their "truth". Below, we analyze the list of titles that have been most purchased in recent years (since 2018), based on data provided by the publishing sector consulted by ARA, with a predominance of titles linked to the Procés.

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal said that we can all be sculptors of our own brain, referring to its enormous plasticity and how, with our actions, we can shape it. In this sense, surely one of the most powerful chisels is reading. Under the pretext of the quintessential day for book lovers, we propose five publications to grow and shape gray matter: memoirs, written with humor, about the passion for mathematics; a collection of ideas, reflections, and thoughts from who is surely one of the pivotal minds of the 21st century; an ode to the brain and its enormous capacity to rebuild, reconfigure, and remodel itself through breathing and meditation; the experience of nine women working and living together for a few days on a Martian station; and, finally, a journey through the history of medicine and humanity to dismantle, forever, the myths and biases that have surrounded women's mental health. Neither crazy nor hysterical.

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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.

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