It has been more than half a century since Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955) read his first Henry James (New York, 1843 - London, 1916). "I had just turned 19, and I entered that very particular world with The Portrait of a Lady –he recalls now–. It was in the summer, and I discovered it for pleasure, without anyone recommending it or demanding it as a university course reading. It interested me so much that I went on to read the rest of his work over the following years, and then I reread it, and I ended up writing many articles about it. Since The Portrait of a Lady, I have never stopped keeping James in mind".

Perhaps because "everyone lies at one time or another" –as Jean-Luc Nancy states in La vérité du mensonge (Bayard, 2021)–, truth is in a permanent crisis. This crisis has been aggravated over the last decades by the end of the single narrative advocated by postmodernity, the multiplication of the capacity for impact and the transmission of lies through social media, which have become one of the great trending topics of our present, and the worrying expansion of falsehoods that artificial intelligence can transmit.

It rarely happens that a novel literally subjugates its readers, I mean that for a few days life starts to revolve around the attention we devote to reading a work of fiction. And that afterwards, once the reading is finished, it starts to revolve around the impact the novel has left on us, the emotions it has made us feel, or the ideas it has summoned, or brought to life, within our thoughts. This has recently happened to me with Before the Darkness Comes, by Fausto Puerto Quetglas, which has just been published by Angle Editorial. It has happened to me, moreover, twice: when I read it in original form, about a year ago, and now that I have reread it as a published book. The author, I will not hide it, is a good friend of mine, but believe me that this is entirely irrelevant: the novel would be magnificent regardless even if Puerto Quetglas and I did not know each other at all, as is possible for many of you, unless you are customers of the Món de Llibres bookstore, in Manacor, which the author has been running for more than twenty years.

With the Catalan Book Week finished with record figures, both in terms of the number of visitors and the volume of sales, this weekend the baton of literary fairs is taken up by the already established Liberisliber in Besalú, with a "full capacity" in the central squares of Sant Pere and the Cloister of this tourist town in La Garrotxa, where stalls from a total of 69 independent publishing labels will be set up, and with a dense program of activities that seek to promote a taste for reading. To contribute its "grain of sand" to achieving this goal, and "given the worrying situation revealed by the latest reports on reading", Liberisliber has set out to work beyond the Besalú fair and has announced the launch, for the end of October, of the digital resource Lektur.cat: a recipe book in which, with the help of illustrators such as Dani Torrent or Anna Font, various and original strategies are proposed to encourage children and adults to read and to guide them in choosing their reading material.

Although We, the Survivors (Les Hores/Anagrama) is the first novel by Tash Aw (Taipei, 1971) that we can read in Catalan, the work of this author born in Taiwan, raised in Malaysia, and emigrated to the United Kingdom has had a remarkable international journey for two decades. With his debut, The Harmony Silk Factory (Harper, 2005; in Spanish at Salamandra, with the title La fábrica de sedas), he was already a Booker finalist, a merit he has repeated on two more occasions: with Five Star Billionaire (Fourth State, 2013) and also with We, the Survivors. Translated into more than twenty languages (in Catalan by Míriam Cano), Tash Aw explores in his novels the day-to-day life of the Malaysian working class. We, the Survivors narrates, with remarkable precision and subtlety, the sexual awakening of a 16-year-old boy in parallel with his parents' marital crisis and his relationship with his sisters.

In person, Zadie Smith (London, 1975) has as much character as the protagonists of her novels. For years, the author of novels such as White Teeth (2000) and NW (2012) –in Catalan at La Magrana– has combined fiction with essays, and this week she has visited Barcelona to present her latest and lush collection of non-fiction texts, Feel Free (Jande/Salamandra; translated into Catalan by Elena Ordeig Vila). In it, she recovers articles published in the press, prologues, award acceptance speeches, and some unpublished pieces where she combines autobiographical notes with burning issues of current affairs, such as addiction to mobile phones and the resurgence of racism. Smith, who has shared a conversation about beauty at the CCCB with the writer Édouard Louis, regrets having agreed to give interviews after having had a rough night. Perhaps that is why her answers are brief, although they cannot avoid containing, in essence, a sample of the novelist's intelligence.

The reader who starts Les conseqüències (Proa, 2026), the fifth novel by Pere Antoni Pons (Campanet, 1980), will have trouble stopping reading the story, magnetic, intriguing, and crafted with great skill, of a writer and journalist who, after his divorce and in the midst of a complex new romantic relationship, resumes contact with an old high school friend who will propose he investigate the mysterious visit to Mallorca of two Nazi officers in the middle of the Second World War. This is the starting point of a book that is devoured while following the adventures of a middle-aged man who, in parallel to his vital disorientation, knows how to unearth links between the fascism of the 1940s, the far-right groups that surfaced during the Transition, and the current resurgence of an ultraconservative radicalism. Three and a half years after Contra el món (Empúries, 2023), Les conseqüències confirms the skill and ambition of Pons, a poet, narrator, and literary critic (at ARA) who knows how to combine the speed required by a thriller with the digestion demanded by a novel of ideas, concerned with the anti-democratic and neoliberal drift of our present.

At what point did quantum physics go from being a theoretical revolution to a force capable of transforming or even destroying the world? It may seem like a complex question to answer, but it is an entirely necessary approach in times of war and polarization. The Doctor of Quantum Optics from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and science communicator Sònia Fernández-Vidal (Barcelona, 1978) concludes the successful trilogy The Door of the Three Locks with the prequel titled The Shadow of the Two Suns (Destino). Aimed at a young audience, the author once again turns to fiction to put one of the great debates of our time on the table: what has led human beings to the development of nuclear energy and the atomic bomb? Despite being a story with fictional characters, Fernández-Vidal incorporates tangible certainties and figures of 20th-century science.

Writing with a mobile phone is a pain. Writing anything at all, but especially texts of a certain length, be they books, articles, or whatsapps long enough to function as modern-day epistles. Surely someone will tell me that to write books you don't need anything digital, that paper and pencil are enough; it should be like that, but that is not the case for someone like me, for whom the computer is an indispensable appendix to my work. Once I tried writing a story by hand and it was a fiasco: I am too used to deleting, changing, reordering. The thing is that this summer I had to write with my mobile phone; I was away and hadn't brought my laptop (I didn't want to lug it around for weeks for just a couple of articles: space in a cabin-sized suitcase is too precious), so I used a wireless keyboard that is a marvel: it weighs little, takes up little space, and is comfortable enough to write with. However, the mobile phone screen is tiny and my presbyopic eyesight doesn't help, so despite the keyboard, the whole thing was a bit annoying. I was thinking about all this the other day when I saw one of those foldable phones with a spaceship name –Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra– which has a huge eight-inch screen. Wow. Having one would be like carrying a laptop in your pocket at all times, ready to be drawn. Bam. I fantasized for a while (not long) about the idea: it would be great for writing on the go, and also for reading, which is another thing we writers do to a somewhat pathological degree (I have read entire books on the tiny mobile screen); it would be ideal for writing and illustrating with photos the travel diary that I have been thinking about doing for years. I fantasized until I saw the price: more than two thousand euros. What a chimera. But fantasy has no stopping point and, just as water always finds a path to flow down if its way is blocked, illusions also drag whatever is necessary to keep moving forward. And what if they gave it to me? I am not a influencer, of course, I already know; my celebrity is like that of a breadcrumb embedded in the sole of Lamine Yamal's shoe. Like an atom of shit stuck to the anus of the Taylor Swift. Or not even that, because the fans would kill for an atom of Swiftian excrement. Why would anyone gift a phone to a writer, and even more so, to a Catalan writer who doesn't even write bestsellers? Mobile phones are gifted to people who matter and who have things to say: to tiktokers who scratch their ass with both hands, at youtubers that talk about soccer or any other topic the further away from culture the better, at instagrammers and gamers and company. I read that Bill Gates has been gifted a few, and also one to Alexia Putellas, who look, with her I am actually happy because she is a hell of a woman and she has guts. They give them away, of course, only to people who could easily afford them; the gift is, in fact, a plea: please use it, so they see you with my gadget and thus I bring prestige to the brand, etc. And this is the crux of the matter: prestige.The growing marginality of written culture

Written culture no longer provides any kind of prestige. It is like that. To me, coming from another century and having seen things you wouldn't believe –ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate–, it feels strange. I perfectly understand that there is a lighter popular culture; a culture that must be there, and that it is good that it is; a culture in which I also participate at times, because there must be moments for everything; a culture, however, that cannot be everything.That written culture is becoming a marginal thing is also evidenced in mobile phone advertising, as well as in that of the spaceship; only its audiovisual capabilities are praised: it is used to watch (poorly) movies, to scroll listlessly, to play video games (how many hours devoted to Candy Crush, my God!), to take photos and videos and upload them to social networks. If I had one I would also do all of this, of course, because I am human and I live in the year 2026, but I would also get the most out of it to write and read, I would give real utility to the eight-inch screen. However, the use the user gives it is secondary to the manufacturer: what matters is that it is a status symbol.I know they won't give me one. The truth is that it might be a bit strange to have a mobile phone that is worth a third of what my second-hand car cost. And now that I mention a car, I think of the thousands of kilometers I travel every year for work: reading clubs, conferences, talks, presentations. They could give me a Peugeot 2008 with large logos on the doors communicating that Peugeot supports culture, and I would commit to pronouncing the brand name with a radiant and sincere smile (it would be) at every event, interview, or presentation I did; and since I am a writer, I would explain the excellence of the product with beautiful words. But who cares about beautiful written words anymore?

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This summer we went to Brittany to rediscover a landscape that seduced us years ago and, above all, to be able to rest for a few days from the suffocating and overwhelming heat we had at home. We achieved this goal because the Atlantic air stopped the thermometers during the day and cooled the nights by the sea.

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There are episodes in history that, when they occur, "prove decisive for centuries and centuries," recalls Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) in one of his most emblematic books, The Right Moment: Great Moments in Humanity, which can be read in Catalan thanks to the translation by Maria Pous for Quaderns Crema in 2004. This is the reading that Regina Rodríguez Sirvent (Alp, 1983) recommends for this summer. The author of Popcorn at Dawn, a novel published by La Campana that was the best-selling this Sant Jordi and continues at the top of the lists of best-selling fiction books in Catalan, has chosen the most famous essay by the prolific Austrian author, also known for short novels like Letter from a Unknown Woman (1927) and biographies such as Marie Antoinette (1932). "I like it so much that while I was reading it, I thought I would have liked to have written it," she assures.

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Until very recently, the literary world and the world of video games were two parallel universes that barely touched each other, beyond some adaptation of a novel turned into a game. But in recent years, the publishing market has seen the birth and growth of a new genre that has moved from the margins to become a mass phenomenon. Dubbed LitRPG (the acronym stands for literary role playing game, in English), this trend brings together novels that use the tools of video games to advance the story. Characters have a health bar that decreases with enemy attacks, and as the plot progresses and they level up, they gain skill points that are recorded in the novel and acquire new weapons to face their opponents. They are essentially adventure books, full of challenges for their protagonists and designed for reader entertainment, but which at the same time delve into social and political issues of our present.

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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.

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When I see that the most popular books and those that occupy the top spots on the bestseller lists are works without any literary ambition, without any stylistic awareness, written in poor language, full of clichés and flat characters, and that what is most highlighted about them is that they are about this or that, my heart sinks. Wal·lah (I swear, as they would say in my neighborhood) that I don't say this out of envy (I feel fortunate to have readers who have conveyed their affection to me since I published my first short story in my high school magazine, and although this may be a capital sin of national scope, I envy writers capable of overcoming the numerous doubts that accompany our work to create magnificent works, those that I would have liked to write, but in this case, the destructive force of envy transforms into its positive counterpart: admiration).

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I have often spoken with editors and booksellers about an issue that is quite incomprehensible: collections of short stories or narratives – say some and others – are difficult to sell. In most cases, all of us participating in the conversation agree that the short story is an excellent genre, that we are a country with a very good tradition of short story writers, but, alas, the idea has taken hold that readers are not in favor of them, so short stories are published little. Few are also written, and we don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg. It is also significant that short story awards are significantly less substantial than novel awards.

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If summer is "the promise that life can begin again", as Francis Scott Fitzgerald assured, a good way to accompany this restart can be reading. The good health of the Catalan publishing sector makes it possible for us to undertake a multitude of journeys – geographical and temporal – without leaving home. We select ten intrepid books that have arrived in Catalan bookstores in recent months.

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A Greek island whose name we never learn is the idyllic setting where Erietta (Acantilado, 2026) unfolds, the debut as a novelist by Clara Pastor (Massachusetts, 1970) after having published two short story collections. The author, translator, and editor – she is the soul of the exquisite Elba since 2009 – explains the summer that Fiona, a middle-aged woman who has just divorced, spends in a rented house, trying to put her life back together. Among men who desire her and others who disappoint her, Fiona meets a solitary and wise woman who acts as a grandmother without being one and has a very particular relationship with her son.

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Rachel lives in Los Angeles, she is Jewish (but not religious) and has a serious problem with food. She cannot stand the idea of gaining weight and what she has experienced at home does not help her: her mother instilled in her the obsession with maintaining her figure, so Rachel's therapist recommends that she cut off all contact for a long period. On the other hand, Rachel meets a sales assistant in a yogurt shop (Yo!Good) and is fascinated by her. It's Miriam, who always insists on putting the maximum amount of yogurt and extras in her tub, when Rachel would prefer it flat and with counted calories. Miriam is also a woman of great anatomical splendor: she is fat, I mean, but that doesn't seem to bother her at all. The inevitable will happen: Rachel will fall in love with Miriam. The frozen yogurt chain is owned by her family, which is why she helps out by working as a sales assistant there. The family: orthodox Jews, who rigorously celebrate the Sabbath, and where it is unthinkable to willingly accept a lesbian relationship. Rachel is not exclusively lesbian: she has had male and female partners. But with Miriam she has found a sexual partner that allows her, at the same time, to let her guard down regarding food. Together they enjoy themselves equally in bed and at the table. Rachel starts to gain weight, but while she is with Miriam, this doesn't seem to worry her. Everything goes well until, at a dinner at Miriam's family's house, Rachel happens to make some political comments about the oppression suffered by Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. This opens a Pandora's box that will determine the entire latter part of the novel, which, naturally, I will not reveal. Ingenuity and pleasantness

To the reader who now wonders if they would enjoy reading a story with this theme, it should be explained that this is a text written with wit and charm and offers a de-dramatizing view of eating disorders. One of the text's great successes is relating food to sex. How can one, in effect, enjoy one without the other? “Love –writes the narrator– is when you have food in your mouth and you know it won't make you fat. Lust is when you have food in your mouth and you know it will make you fat”.But what happens when love and lust merge? A strange oasis, an unusual and absolute freedom: exactly what Rachel finds in Miriam. And the miracle happens: “Tasting her saltiness, I was struck by the sensation of eternity, as if it were all before us, lived by our ancestors in Russia, Lithuania, Poland, or Moldova. We were two Jewish women from the shtetl [Jewish village] reincarnated, two women who had met in a previous life and had loved each other. I had the sensation that everything that had happened before was happening now, at that moment, and that everything that was happening at that moment would happen forever. That love had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were spreading it. It radiated through the windows of my apartment, across the city, through the canyons, beyond the hills, into the night sky”.Being a collection of erotic literature, the sex scenes are good: “I went down to her breasts and rubbed my face against her blouse firmly, so she could feel me well. Her nipples hardened under the cotton fabric”... and I leave the rest to the imagination of the readers.As that old advertisement slogan said: “Life is not made for counting calories”. But Rachel hasn't discovered that until she fell in love. Let's call it sex, let's call it love: the abysmal debauchery that leads lovers to the great banquet of their own bodies.

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The promissory note for a million pounds sterling, written by Mark Twain in 1893, is more than a humorous narrative about an extraordinary stroke of luck. Under the guise of a light and witty tale, Twain constructs a relentless critique against a society that confuses the value of people with that of the money they claim to possess. With incisive intelligence, he dissects the mechanisms of social prestige, the hypocrisy of the affluent classes, and the fragility of human judgments.The protagonist, an honest but ruined man, receives a miraculous object: an IOU for one million pounds sterling. The paradox is immediate: he has an immense fortune that, in fact, he cannot use. Twain thus reveals that the power of money lies not so much in its utility as in the perception it generates. No one checks if that stranger is really rich; it is enough that he appears to be for the treatment he receives to change radically. When a smile turns into discomfort

Humor becomes a critical weapon of extraordinary effectiveness. The situations often verge on the absurd, but behind each comic scene lies a severe denunciation. The reader laughs at the misunderstandings caused by the famous promissory note, but the smile soon turns to discomfort when they discover how plausible the characters' behavior turns out to be. The novel also offers a lucid reflection on identity. The protagonist does not undergo any essential transformation: he remains the same intelligent, prudent, and honest man. What changes is the gaze of others. This inversion of perspectives highlights that social identity is often a collective construction fueled by prejudices, interests, and conventions. The narrative style reinforces this critical view. The language is clear, lively, and of an apparent simplicity that hides an extraordinary satirical precision. Mark Twain shies away from any moralizing temptation and lets the facts themselves unmask the contradictions of the world he portrays. This expressive economy turns irony into a great engine of the narrative: the reader understands the inconsistency of their attitudes long before the characters do.One of the most remarkable aspects of the work is its relevance. Despite being written in the 19th century, it dialogues with a society in which image, status, and public projection continue to condition personal relationships. Today, as then, reputation is often built on the perception of success, rather than on the real worth of people. The Million Pound Bank Note is a brilliant satire that questions the moral foundations of a society fascinated by money. With elegant and devastating irony, Twain shows that wealth exerts an almost theatrical power: it shapes the perception of others, conditions opportunities, and alters human relationships. More than a century later, this fable continues to challenge us with surprising relevance.

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It started as an internet meme and has become a reading trend among younger people: John Steinbeck is in vogue. The thing is that the actress and screenwriter Zoe Kazan is directing the adaptation of East of Eden which will premiere on Netflix this fall, so the forgotten classic of more than six hundred pages that follows the intertwined destinies of the Hamilton and Trask families from the Civil War to the First World War is on all the nightstands of young American readers. Florence Pugh appears in the miniseries conceived by Kazan, and it is already known that there will be an adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, the Nobel laureate's other great novel, with rumors that Ryan Murphy could embody the endearing and nonconformist Tom Joad.All this is good news, of course. Firstly, because here at home Steinbeck is beginning to reappear after many years out of print. Proa reissued just over a year ago the short and magnificent Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, translated by Xavier Pàmies (I had a version by Pedrolo of the first and I remember reading a translation by Jordi Arbonès of the second, if I'm not mistaken). Viena has in its catalogue The Red Pony (trad. Joaquim Mallafrè) and the chronicle the author wrote of his adventures with his dog, Travels with Charley (trad. Marc Donat). And the best news: Tigre de Paper has dared to publish East of Eden for the first time in Catalan, with an excellent translation by Miquel Sorribas. And the worst news: The Grapes of Wrath continues to be out of print, only available in some libraries with a translation by Mercè López Arnabat.All this is good omen, too, for what it may mean for Steinbeck to be read again. It will be necessary to see if Kazan's adaptation maintains the epic and tragic spirit of the author, who delves into the problem of identity, betrayal, inheritance, and love without concessions, or if it creates a digestible product, as Emerald Fennell did with Wuthering Heights, which Mariana Enríquez described as a "boring and silly" film, as it turned a dark and demonic story that explores the beauty of the abyss, depression, and love for darkness into something sexy.Will the same happen with Steinbeck? We will see. For the moment, however, he is being read, and for many young Americans it will involve discovering, in the story of Adam Trask, that there was a Civil War in their country, migratory waves of workers on the Californian coast, and a World War that marked millions of families. Even more: they will discover that the mantra of "you can", so totemic and unappealable in their culture, is a fallacy, and that social determinism condemns the majority of lives, including American ones.I started the Hot Steinbeck Summer with The Grapes of Wrath, in a nineties edition from the MOLU collection, and I thought the same thing I thought with East of Eden: that it is a privilege to be able to read it. Because no one describes like him the inseparable bond between man and the land he works (we realize it now, with the viral clip of a farmer from Calonge lamenting the fire that devastates everything). Because no one finds more enduring images to portray poverty: that of Rose of Sharon, who has just given birth to a dead baby, breastfeeding a starving and skeletal worker. Because in the caravan of the Joad family heading to California seeking the promise of a better life, the history of what awaits us in the coming years is written: climate and political refugees, people desperately seeking an opportunity (and the impossibility of finding it). Because just for Tom's monologue to his mother, it's worth reading: "Like when he explained that time he went to the desert to find his soul, but then he found he didn't have one of his own. He says he discovered he only had a piece of a big soul. And he said that staying in the desert was useless, because his piece of soul was useless if it wasn't next to the rest, if it wasn't part of the whole soul".Reading Steinbeck will not cure us of anything, but it will prepare us for everything.

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