Que morin els fills dels altres, the second novel by Roser Cabré-Verdiell (Barcelona, 1982), has won the 55th Crexells Prize, awarded annually by the Ateneu Barcelonès and endowed with 6,000 euros. "It is a singular story, which shakes the family institution right from the title, impactful and enigmatic, and which is written in a forceful and lyrical prose that transports the reader through a world that moves in ambiguity," highlights the jury, made up of Lluïsa Julià, Xavier Aliaga, Francesco Ardolino, Montserrat Palau, Xènia Dyakonova, and Eva Piquer.

In this article I would like to make two recommendations. The first is that you read The Abandoned Woman, by Balzac, which Viena Edicions has published in the collection Petits Plaers, translated by Josep Maria Pinto. The second recommendation is that, if you are one of those who have the habit —like me— of reading with a pencil in hand to underline especially beautiful or interesting phrases or paragraphs, this time you let it go. I let it go when I realized I was underlining practically everything.

The year she got pregnant, María Oruña (Vigo, 1976) planned everything. She left her job at an international law firm because she worked too many hours and couldn't balance her personal and professional life, opened her own office, created a website, and wrote an essay on labor law with advice and guidance for people who might need it. She had planned to take a year to write that first book, but in the end, she only spent four months on it. And with the time she had left, she started writing something to entertain herself. That draft eventually became Puerto escondido (2015; Port Amagat, in the Catalan edition by Columna), the novel that catapulted her to become one of the best-selling authors in Spain. But the beginnings of a literary phenomenon are rarely easy or quick.

A good relationship with your father keeps you company and drives you throughout your life; a bad relationship with your father weighs you down and deforms you throughout your life. Matthew Tree (Barcelona, 1958), the London-born writer who has lived in Catalonia for decades and has produced his literary work in both English and Catalan, always had a conflictive and hurtful relationship with his father, a tormented and problematic man who, in turn, had an alcoholic and absent father. Be that as it may, however, a father is always a father, and, even long after they are dead (Tree's father died in 1994), children remember them, keep them in mind, and often need to understand them.In Almost Everything, a book that functions as a portrait of his father, as a sketch of an autobiography, and as a transcription and interpretation of existing literary materials, Matthew Tree sets out to understand the enigma that his father has always been for him. It is an enigma full of thorns and holes, because Tree remembers and writes from the awareness of many grievances and many wounds. He explicitly states that for a long time he blamed his father for the severe chronic obsessive disorder he has suffered for a large part of his life and which has at times made him feel dramatically uncomfortable in his own skin and led him to drink too much.Tree, in any case, does not write out of vengeful resentment, but out of a desire to investigate and understand. His father was the man who humiliated him in public, who had fits of rage and from whom he, as a son, needed to escape, but he was also the man he loved and who was capable of great displays of affection. In the initial pages, Tree explains that he does not want to settle accounts with his father, and perhaps this is true, but this does not detract from the fact that the whole book – and this is one of its virtues – has a ghostly air of an unfinished conversation.Sordid, gloomy and at the same time moving

The trigger for Tree's literary maneuver, originally written in English and translated into Catalan by Jordi Dausà Mascort, is the reading of his father's youth diaries, a reading that did not occur until years after finding them – and it is evident that this impasse denotes many things, from reverential respect to fear, disinterest, and repudiation. It is one of the axes of Almost Everything: the faithful transcription, only modestly commented, of what are supposed to be some of the most interesting and significant passages of young Michael Tree's diary production.Conscientious objector during World War II and in the midst of the blitz, “pacifist, socialist and Anglican,” a fervent believer tortured by the notion of sin, a young man with hormones boiling afflicted by complicated relationships with women and sex, a depressive son of a father prematurely destroyed by alcohol, a vocational writer who published three novels that passed without glory or shame and who, after leaving literature, lived submerged in a prosperous but very frustrating life, full of enervating self-pity and rage: the reader's impression when reading these diary fragments is that Michael Tree was made of good stuff, but that the moral rigidity of the time and personal circumstances corroded him. All in all, it has that air of sordidness, a bit grim and a bit moving, of Philip Larkin's poems.Philip Larkin.More than the father's annotations, and the reconstruction of his personality by the son, the most raw and confessional passages of the book are particularly interesting, those in which the son, that is, the author, tells – without prevarication, but also without immodest exhibitionism – the biographical, psychological and literary consequences of the bad relationship with his father. Free from bitterness and resentment, grateful for all the good things life has given him (partner, children, a home in Banyoles), Matthew Tree's conclusion about his father is generous and at the same time terribly stark: he was not a bad person, he was just a very unhappy man. Almost everything proves that painful and sad reproaches can also be a tribute.

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In the novels and stories of the Argentine Patricio Pron (Rosario, 1975) nothing is simple or obvious, but readers who delve into them will find a sophistication, both in form and content, that will reward them handsomely. In En todo hay una grieta y por ella entra la luz (Anagrama, 2026), the life of the poet, filmmaker, and artist Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944) motivates the initial two-page paragraph, but Pron immediately dynamites his plans: the rest of the novel is a succession of notes and footnotes that cover the year the writer himself spent in New York and stimulate reflections on climate change, gentrification, the rise of authoritarian discourses, contemporary art, and romantic relationships.

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None of the more than thirty stories collected in this volume exceed five pages, and some are only one and a half. Because Etgar Keret, one of the great Israeli authors, widely translated and published in publications like The New Yorker or Le Monde, is content with the shortest distance to leave us laughing in the darkest of darkness. By drawing, with few strokes, an alternative world, an AI-made husband simulation, disobedient robots, or a couple of young people doing mitzvahs (good deeds) while high on MDMA, he touches on serious or directly metaphysical themes with the apparent lightness of a koan, planting a seed that contains the power of an exemplary story. The speed with which he resolves extreme situations with the tools of comedy and realistic fiction, combined with a certain futuristic anticipation, turns these stories into something that resembles science fiction, but isn't quite, because the future he describes is too close to us. Keret moves comfortably between genres and worlds, as if he had had the opportunity to travel through the multiverse and returned with a basket full of black humor stories, the weapon of intelligent pessimists.

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There is a question that is often repeated to writers; it is asked by journalists good and bad (even in The Paris Review), it is asked by readers, it is asked by aspiring writers, it is asked by other writers, it is also asked by the writer's friends; it is a question that appears again and again as if it hid the secret of the author's or a work's success (or failure). I can understand it, of course; just as, if we want to lose weight, we ask the friend who has lost ten kilos how they did it, we imagine that if we want to write, we can do the same: imitate a formula, a method. I admit that the question also interests me; although I don't believe in formulas or methods, sometimes you can take advantage of or adapt some of the ideas of others. The question is: when and where do you write?There are writers who write in the morning, others in the evening – although there are fewer who write in the early afternoon – some at odd hours (apparently Murakami gets up at four in the morning to write, which is more or less the time they say Dostoevsky finished writing and went to sleep). Regarding the place where one writes, there is also something for everyone: secluded cottages (Woolf), rooms lined with cork (Proust), desks with rotten apples (Schiller), bars (J. K. Rowling), hotels (Nabokov and the Fairmont Le Montreux Palace), libraries (Borges), squares (Perec and Place Saint-Sulpice). Some writers write sitting down, others lying down, a few standing up. Some need silence, others want continuous noise (which is another kind of silence). There are devotees of handwriting (and here we would enter into the fetishes of writing tools: pens, pencils, specific brand and color pens, etc.) and those who cannot do without a computer (and then: font, size, spacing, software, and company).Although the answers could not be more varied, The Method continues to be pursued. Writers themselves encapsulate themselves in their rituals (aka quirks), with an almost superstitious faith: perhaps they are afraid that if they alter what has worked for them until then, the result will suffer. This is why myths end up being created around this topic. Writing then becomes a ceremonial with a specific liturgy: one enters the chosen sanctuary and performs the established rites. Writing, in effect, is an act of faith.Writing is like sleeping

When they ask me –where and how do you write?–, I answer that I write when I can (almost never, but, if necessary, at the most convenient time, although for practical, not superstitious, reasons, it ends up being during standard working hours), that I write on the computer sitting on a 65 cm diameter ball (because instability helps prevent my muscles from atrophying and who knows if ideas too). But I always repeat that writing is like sleeping: obviously there are certain more optimal spaces and conditions for sleeping – a bed, an environment without harshness – but if you are truly sleepy you will end up sleeping anywhere: on the floor, on the subway, in class. The same happens with writing; whoever has the need to write will end up writing wherever and however they can. Therefore, I rebel against the fetishism of ritual and sanctuary. Liturgy does not make writers, it makes fanatics.There is another question that published writers or those who want to become one are repeatedly asked, it is a question that students from the institute where you have given a talk ask, as well as adults attending a conference or asking you to sign a book. The question is usually preceded by an introduction: I like to write, I would like to be a writer, I am writing a novel, I don't know how to get started, so: how do I do it to be a writer? The answer is very simple. To be a writer you have to do only one thing, only one thing that has nothing to do with having rotten apples on your desk and sitting there at three in the morning with a Remington Victor T. I always tell them that to write the only thing you need is: to write. What an obvious thing, right? True, but I often feel that there are people who get so caught up in the scenery that they lose perspective. If you want to write, you just have to write. Repetition is the best (the only?) method: just as a creature when it starts drawing makes horses that look like dogs and it is only thanks to perseverance and paying attention to mistakes that the technique is polished, in writing there is also an important part of practice and critical review. This method, however, is not very popular. Miraculous methods that promise a masterpiece with little effort – losing ten kilos in a week – are always preferred. Another day we will talk about the third (absurd) recurring question: inspiration.

]]> The Oresund Strait is a bottleneck, four kilometers at its narrowest point, separating the North Sea and the Baltic Sea (to give you an idea, the Strait of Hormuz is thirty). The Danes built Kronborg Castle there, a fortress to control the passage and charge tolls to commercial vessels. At the end of the 16th century, the fortress was transformed into a magnificent Renaissance castle, of an opulence that made it famous throughout Europe.The castle is in the city of Helsingor, today better known in the rest of the world as Elsinore, an English name that Shakespeare used when, a few years after the great reformation, he set Hamlet there. I was able to visit it this Sunday and rarely have I had the impression of a place where literature corresponds so exactly with what you see: corridors, guard posts, Nordic coldness and conspiracies, even the great hall where Hamlet could have had the death of his father performed. It doesn't matter that Shakespeare had never been there. To be or not to be is about that.

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Throughout her life, writer Laila Karrouch (Nador, Morocco, 1977) has had to unlearn and relearn a series of things that were instilled in her from childhood. "I come from a culture where we have learned things that don't fit with the life I have here. Over time, I have sought forgiveness from the people I have constantly judged. I've spent many years shedding labels, and it's unfair for me to put them on others," reflects Karrouch. Around this intimate exercise, the writer has built the novel Swear You'll Return (Univers), a love story between two women in the Rif in the 80s and 90s. "Homosexuality between women in the Muslim world is taboo, it's not talked about. But different love has always existed and will always exist. Denying it is absurd," argues the author.

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There are novels with prose so ponderous, with a rhythm so heavy and a breath so short that the pages seem to pant from sedentary overweight. The prose of the novel Tota la vida buscant, by Kae Tempest (London, 1985), a highly recognized name in the world of poetry, dramaturgy, and rhapsody, aims to be the exact opposite: agile, strong, sharp, tense, between electric lyricism, frontal narration, and raw realism. Sometimes Kae Tempest does not succeed in her purpose, and then she produces telegraphically anemic descriptions and repetitive passages, of a paralyzing prolixity. Sometimes she does achieve it, however, and then the novel vibrates with that authenticity that we usually attribute to things, people, and works not distorted by gratuitous sophistications or spurious intentions.The protagonist of the novel – I'm writing it this way because the central character, Rothko, is non-binary, just like theauthor, and also because, beyond whatever opinion each reader may have about inclusive language, literature is always an exercise in personal creativity and expressiveness, and therefore Tempest is as legitimized as Joyce to do whatever she wants with the language– is thirty-six years old and has just returned to her town after spending fifteen years in prison. The landscape she finds there is as desolate and depressing as when she had to leave: a mother who is a junkie in total process of degradation; a failed and absent father; an affectionate but difficult sister... In addition, Rothko experiences a double malaise, which has to do with her theoretically already overcome addictions and with her inability to feel fully as she is in her female body.The novel is divided into three parts, and unfolds like an omniscient panorama of which Rothko is the simultaneously afflicted and hopeful axis. In the first part, we witness Rothko's re-establishment of contact with his former world and his old life. Tempest describes very well Rothko's costly adaptation to freedom, his shame and his powerlessness in the face of a present that frightens him, and also knows how to paint in a very genuine and natural way the entire galaxy of wounded, damaged, poor and often marginal supporting characters who swarm his world. Where Tempest's talent shines brightest is in the synthetic narration of situations and the expressive exploration of personalities. In this sense, the pages about Rothko's parents, Ezra and Meg, why they are the way they are, what relationship they have maintained between them, are exceptional.Towards the redemptive culmination

The second part of the novel takes place twenty years earlier, and introduces us to Rothko as an adolescent, uncomfortable and out of place because she is a girl who wants to be a boy but does not dare to admit it. Although it also has emotional and strong passages, it is more conventional, like a typical bildungsroman: the decaying and uncomprehending family environment, pleasure and vice, ambient homophobia, love and sex with a girl who understands her... In the third part, Tempest returns to the present and recovers the rhythm and plasticity of her best prose, and, with a melodramatic touch, offers an atonement and a redemptive culmination, of possible reconstruction, for Rothko.The idea that art should have no function beyond being powerful and complex is very modern and perfectly legitimate and defensable, but it is also evident that it is an artistic conception that sometimes stems from the privilege of hegemony. I mean that Tempest, in her condition as a trans man who has already completed the complicated and painful process that her protagonist intends to go through, has also written this book to guide and explain. There are quite didactic dialogues, which are noticeably written to offer companionship and care to those who need it. One of the great things about good literature is that it makes familiar what is initially strange, and this All My Life Searching achieves it.

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"I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead." Thus begins Ghost Stories (Edicions 62 / Seix Barral, 2026; translated by Jordi Martín Lloret), the memoir that Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) has needed to write after the "horrible years" that followed the diagnosis of lung cancer in the author of The New York Trilogy and Leviathan. The volume reconstructs the 43 years of relationship between Siri and Paul in chapters that advance and retreat in time to show the difficult moment the author was going through. Hustvedt's urgent yet reflective narrative combines with the last texts Auster wrote, a series of letters intended so that his grandson Miles –born months before the writer's death– can one day know what kind of family he has grown up in.

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Henry and June is the intimate diary in which Anaïs Nin (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1903 - 1977, Los Angeles) narrates her relationship with Henry Miller and his mysterious wife, June Mansfield, in 1930s Paris. The volume includes material excluded from the original diary and previously unpublished. The text comes from diaries 32 and 36, titled June, The Possessed, Henry, Apotheosisand Fall and Diary of a Possessed Woman, written between October 1931 and October 1932. Anaïs Nin opens the doors to her inner world with unusual sincerity. The reader delves into an intense period of the author's life marked by convoluted emotional bonds and by an attraction that defies social and moral norms. But there may also be readers who come away from "Henry and June" with the feeling that they have followed the adulterous day-to-day life of a spoiled, narcissistic child, a victim of an Oedipal complex with no sense of personal ethics, who writes with an emotional overload that overflows, always disguised as a "virgin-prostitute" and a "perverse angel", as she calls herself. Living fully without falling into internal conflicts

The charm of Anaïs Nin is that, beyond recounting turbulent personal relationships, she constructs a narrative that delves into issues such as self-construction, the contradictions of desire and jealousy, and the role of women in a still restrictive cultural context. Nin does not shy away from showing hesitations, paradoxes, or vulnerability; on the contrary, she turns them into literary material, exploring the extent to which it is possible to live fully without falling into internal conflicts. From late 1931 to late 1932, Nin falls in love with the writings of Henry Miller and the surprising beauty of his wife June. When June leaves Paris for New York, Henry and Anaïs begin a passionate (and toxic) affair that sexually and morally liberates her, but also sabotages her own marriage to Hugo and she begins to take an interest in psychoanalysis. Anaïs Nin builds a visceral chronicle about the fragmentation of desire. The love triangle she explains in her "confidant", the diary, is not a geometric figure with equal sides, but an emotional labyrinth where identity blurs into the other. Miller represents artistic and carnal liberation. He is the mirror of the rawness that she, until then trapped in refinement, needed to write from truth. The attraction to June is almost mystical. Nin not only desires June, but desires to be June. She represents the wild, unattainable, and destructive femininity that fascinates and terrifies the author. Nin does not position herself in a passive vertex; she is the narrative center that manipulates and analyzes the tensions. The triangle serves to explore her own bisexuality and the capacity to love multiple versions of reality simultaneously.Anaïs Nin's style in Henry and June stands out for a writing rich in emotional nuances that combines psychological reflection and feminist sensibility. The writer filters the sordidness of relationships through an dreamlike language, transforming adultery into a religious quest for freedom. It also offers a vivid look at interwar Paris, at the restless and experimental artistic atmosphere, a time when creative freedom coexisted with deep insecurities. Published in 1986 (many years after it was written), Henry and June had a strong impact because it revealed a more intimate and daring facet of the author. The book can be read as a bold personal testimony and also as a key piece for understanding her literary and life journey.

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Until she turned thirty, Mar Márquez (Barcelona, 1981) only spoke Spanish. Despite being born and living in Catalonia, her entire environment communicated in that language, so for her Catalan was a foreign and distant language. But Márquez started working in a place where the working language was Catalan, and she began a relationship with a partner who also spoke it, so she made a decision: "I chose Catalan, I made it my chosen and beloved language. It was hard for me, but I stand by it. Since then, I write and think in Catalan," she states. The choice is even more significant because it was linked to her first steps as a future writer. Starting from classes at the Ateneu Barcelonès, Márquez began to craft the seed of her first novel, Amat Amat, which she has just published with Males Herbes. "I am a great defender of the language. Let's create culture in Catalan, please," Márquez demands.

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We read that the short story The Woodsman's Snake (I translate freely, without ChatGPT), winner of a Commonwealth Foundation prize, written by Trinidad and Tobago author Jamir Nazir and published in the magazine Granta, is suspected of having been created with artificial intelligence.

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Not every day do you have the luck to read a newly published book and have the certainty that you have a classic in your hands. This is what happened to me when I read Encara hi sou tots, by Liadan Ní Chuinn, published by La Segona Perifèria and translated into Catalan by Ariadna Pous. They are six extraordinary stories that explore the British colonial legacy in Northern Ireland. Both Irish and English critics already consider her one of the best voices of the generation after the Good Friday Peace Accords. From the person behind the pseudonym, Liadan Ní Chuinn, we only know that she was born in Northern Ireland in 1998, the year these agreements were signed. The name, however, is a declaration of intent: Liadan comes from the ancient Gaelic liath ("grey") and dan ("poet"), and it is the name of a 7th-century Irish poetess who fell in love with the poet Cuirithir, but who chose her vocation and her work and became a nun. NíChuinn is the feminine form of "daughter of Conn", high king of Ireland and legendary ancestor of the Gaelic dynasties. All in all, it would mean ancient poetess, daughter of Ireland. Ancient poetess, daughter of Ireland. Ní Chuinn, with the connivance of her publisher, has made no public appearances, the interviews she has given are written and no portrait of her circulates anywhere. The only contemporary precedent so deliberate was that of Elena Ferrante (until a more than bored journalist unmasked her).In Catalonia we have had milder versions of this same choice. Of Marta Rojals we know her real name and that she is an architect born in 1975 in La Palma d'Ebre, but she has always maintained a clear position: no photographs, no public appearances. Ada Klein writes under a pseudonym and in her debut we only knew she was a doctor, but she did not allow herself to be photographed or make public appearances so as not to mix profession and the literary world. With her second book she has relaxed this stance. Another different example would be that of Irene Solà, whose real face and name we do know, but who actively avoids media exposure, despite her success. These are three ways of trying to preserve something important from the noise.In an era of compulsive overexposure on social media, choosing absolute silence, as Ní Chuinn has done, is an act of freedom and self-esteem that I find admirable. It is only the work that speaks, and it does not need to exhibit the body or instagram one's own biography to achieve the easy dopamine of likes or external admiration and validation. It is surely a necessary gesture if one wants to write freely and truthfully because, let's be honest, addressing a national conflict in a colonizing state is not free anywhere. We know this well in Catalonia, where we have had politicians in prison and in exile. Read from here, then, Ní Chuinn's gesture reminds us that the freedom to write is never a guaranteed right, but a conquest for which each author must continue to fight, in their own way, every day.

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"If you'll take one piece of advice, don't miss this book," he assured a few days ago Keret appears punctually on his computer screen in Tel Aviv, the city where he grew up and where he still lives and teaches creative writing. It's eleven in the morning, but he's been up for hours: he has a habit of going out at a quarter past seven to take a walk on the beach, which is ten minutes from his home. "I'm sorry I haven't been to Barcelona in so long. Maybe with the next book they'll invite me," he admits, before offering a small sample of his irony. "For now, with things the way they are in my country, it's normal for you to be afraid of someone like me coming."

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The Ebrenc Litterarum Fair of Literary and Book Events will be held this year between May 28 and 31 in Móra d’Ebre, and will combine book presentations, exhibitions, and literary events. Since last year, the director of Litterarum has been Lluís-Xavier Flores, who has promoted the search for complicity throughout Catalan-speaking areas by opening sub-seats in other towns and cities, such as Morella, Calaceit, Tortosa, or Reus. “One of the challenges is to attract more programmers to the fair and for it to become again the fair of its beginnings, considered strategic by the Institution of Catalan Letters”, states Flores.

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"Iberia resembles a bull's hide stretched from West to East in length, with the front parts facing East, and from North to South in width. It is approximately six thousand stadia in length; in width, in the widest band, it is about five thousand, although there are places below three thousand, especially in the Pyrenees, which are on the eastern side." These words serve as an introduction to the third book of the seventeen that make up the ambitious Geography of Strabo (c.63 BC–24 AD), focused on exploring the current Iberian Peninsula more than 2,000 years ago. The author delves into its main cities, temples, and rivers, but also into the peoples that inhabited it, among whom were the Astures, the Lusitanians, the Celtiberians, the Cerretani, and the Layetani. What did the ancient Greeks know about us? To what extent have we changed?

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Black September, by Sandro Veronesi (Florence, 1959), is a coming-of-age novel, but above all it is a novel about the traumatic end of childhood. For the protagonist, Gigio Bellandi, son of an archetypically Italian criminal lawyer (a good guy with worldly vitality) and an exuberant Irish mother (fair-skinned and red-haired) with a much stronger character than she appears, the summer of 1972, which like every year he spent in a small town on the Tuscan coast with his parents and younger sister, marked a before and after in his life. He was twelve years old then, and now that he is sixty he remembers it in great detail. Not until the last pages will we know exactly what happened to him, but from the beginning we will be clear that that decisive summer represented for Gigio the best and the worst of life: the beginning of becoming a man through the fullness of reciprocal love and seeing how his whole small paradise world was shattered by the selfishness and weaknesses of the adults.Considering the plot materials it is made of, Setembre negre, translated into Catalan by Pau Vidal with the very vivid rigor he has accustomed us to, could have been a short novel –quick, agile, condensed and intense–, but it is noticeable that, in addition to telling a story, the author has also wanted to reconstruct a world and an era, that of his pre-adolescent Italy (sports idols, summer routines, musical discoveries), and for this reason the novel is long, detailed, with meanders, always lively but, at times, narratively ceremonial. This narrative and formal option may be a bit wordy in some passages, but in the long run it adds dramatic force to the climax. It also gives the work as a whole that sediment of humble but transcendent wisdom that springs from deeply examined and meticulously distilled experience.A man who remembers, a voice that tells

Two are the main virtues of Black September. The first is the tone of the narrative voice, evocative without nostalgic complacency, reflective in a passionate and robust way. It is a persuasive and warm voice that makes everything it explains interesting, whether it invents pastimes and sun-and-beach routines or reproduces cataclysmic conversations spied on in secret. It is the immense power of literature when it is, purely and simply, a character who remembers and a voice that tells. The second virtue is a gallery of memorable supporting characters: the well-matched marriage of the parents; Astel Raimondi, the girl with whom Gigio discovers the complete happiness of first love; Astel's parents; the anarchist uncle and his example of dignity and resistance; Gigio's discreet and wonderful little sister... They are supporting characters who complement and enrich the protagonist without ever being subordinate to him.In a novel in which for almost three hundred pages the revelation of an exceptionally dramatic event is announced and postponed, there is a risk of not satisfying expectations. This is not the case with Black September: the final revelation and the mix of subtlety and explosiveness with which Veronesi recounts it are admirable and totally effective. The lesson – let's call it a lesson – of it all, moreover, is wise and resonates with great force, and speaks to us, implicitly, of the fatal error of resentment and the heroic feat of forgiveness.

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Ghost Stories, by Siri Hustvedt (Northfield, 1955), is not just a book about loss: it is also a work written from the room that absence leaves when a shared life is broken forever, a book capable of making grief a habitable place. The love letter that is Ghost Stories reflects on the disappearance of love with the clarity of one who knows that pain cannot be tamed with grand gestures, but rather settles into the tiny crevices of everyday life: in an empty chair, in an interrupted sentence, in the unexpected weight of an object that once meant nothing and that, suddenly, becomes a relic. The title is of excellent precision: the ghosts that haunt these pages are not literary specters in the classic sense, but persistent presences of memory, reverberations of an intimacy that resists disappearing. The love for her husband, the writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), is not a memory embellished by art, but a living matter that continues to breathe within loss. The great virtue of the book is its ability to turn intimacy into a universal experience without losing a shred of uniqueness. Hustvedt writes from the wound, but she does so with emotional intelligence, thus avoiding the temptation of grandiloquence or gratuitous melodrama: "I feel Paul's voice". The author's prose, precise and profound, advances with serenity, and analyzes in detail the mechanisms of memory, the traps of recollection, the way the past bursts into the present with devastating force. Every page seems written with the awareness that remembering is, at the same time, an act of love and a condemnation. The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the narrative. The voice of the author of Leviathan emerges as a form of continuity that crosses the text and turns it into a posthumous dialogue, into an interrupted conversation resumed by literature. There is a very deep emotion in this inclusion: the feeling that writing is the last place where two lives can continue to find each other. It is also remarkable how Hustvedt reflects on identity when the loving bond disappears. Who are we when the other, who had helped us define ourselves, is no longer there? What remains of the self after annihilation? These questions run through the book like an underground current and give it a philosophical density that goes far beyond personal chronicle. Grief is not just the loss of a loved one; it is also the loss of a version of oneself, of shared time, of an intimate language built in two voices.A stunning, elegant, and profoundly human book

Ghost Stories is a work of painful beauty, the kind that doesn't just explain an experience, but makes it resonate within the reader. Hustvedt demonstrates that great literature is capable of entering the most vulnerable areas of existence without simplifying them. The author writes a book about grief, yes, but above all she gives us a book about the persistence of love, about memory as a form of resistance, and about the word as a space where the dead continue to speak with us. Striking, elegant, and profoundly human, it leaves a mark that is difficult to erase.Beyond the strictly autobiographical dimension, Ghost Stories also reads as a profound meditation on the very nature of literature. Hustvedt seems to ask what writing can do in the face of the irreparable. Literature does not console in an easy sense, it does not heal or restore what has been lost, but it does offer a verbal architecture where pain can take shape. Writing is a way of not letting oneself be swallowed by the void. Each sentence seems to be sustained by this tension between silence and the need to speak, between the abyss of loss and the urgency of giving it a grammar. Hustvedt has written a marvelous book that is at once an elegy, an emotional essay, and a piece of memory, with a narrative maturity worthy of the great voices who know that the word is the only possible form of survival.

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