"Laura Galve's first novel unfolds with intelligence and audacity the story of a girl who tells us, in the first person, a piece of adolescence marked by her mother's abandonment and living with an alcohol-addicted father". With these words, Mariana Enriquez, president of the jury for the Diana Zaforteza award, endowed with 20,000 euros, presents the winning work of the third edition of the prize, Dime, niña bonita, which Galaxia Gutenberg will release on November 4th. Its author, Laura Galve (Barcelona, 1996), combined journalism and cultural communication before working as a literary scout. "Between one job and the other, I have been looking for gaps to write this story, and it has not been easy for me for two reasons: because I could not find the time and because of the book's subject matter," acknowledges Galve.

There are novels that feed on chilling real crimes and, by narrating them, bring them back to the table to show the horror the victims suffered. Cosamala (Seix Barral), by Alana S. Portero (Madrid, 1978), goes a little further, because it transcends denunciation through recreation and transformation, thanks to a prose of precise and unsettling beauty, of an episode of the Spanish Civil War experienced in Guillena, a municipality located about 20 km north of Seville. An episode that still shakes everyone who hears about it today, both for its brutality and for the chronological proximity of its discovery.

A few days ago, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, upon accepting the National Culture Award, ended her acceptance speech by saying that if we take care of culture, culture will take care of us. It seemed to me that I had heard her say it on some other occasion, and I found it very fitting: it is hard to think of anyone who can state it with such conviction, and at the same time with such meaning. One only needs to evoke one of Sílvia's songs, or any of her concerts, or even her way of speaking, moving, acting, to see that, certainly, she takes her craft as an act of caring. And of responsibility, too. Mireia Sallarès says this, that having an idea is having a responsibility, and I like how both ideas resonate together because, beyond the political thing or the social dimension of creation in terms of a manifesto or a claim, there is a political action in the gesture of writing (poems, songs, ideas, art...) that deals with a more delicate and sinuous political intention, I would say, more subtle and perhaps imperceptible, which is that of caring and that of having responsibility.

For several years now, Catalan readers have been able to savor the meticulous, introspective, and hallucinatory prose of Mircea Cartarescu (Bucharest, 1956). While Periscopi published Solenoid (2017) and the Blinding trilogy (2018-2022), novels translated by Antònia Escandell Tur, thanks to the Mallorcan publisher Lleonard Muntaner and translator Xavier Montoliu Pauli, the volumes of short stories Why We Love Women (2016), the poems of Nothing (2018), an extensive and essential anthology of his Diaries (2024) have arrived, and now, Travesti, which according to the Romanian author was "the beginning of everything that has come after." This short novel, published in Romanian in 1994, presents a 34-year-old writer who, with the desire to emerge from the crisis he finds himself in, recalls the summer of his adolescence spent in camps where contact with nature, music, and inquiries into his own sexuality changed his life.

At the end of September, a scandal occurred in France that has shaken the publishing and cultural world. The novel that was leading sales in the rentrée littéraire –most fiction narrative is published just upon returning from the summer holidays– seems not to have been written by its author, Thélyson Orélien, alone, but rather that it is due above all to artificial intelligence.

A Brilliant Thief, by Cristina Ros, has been the winning work of the El Vaixell de Vapor Award from Editorial Cruïlla, a cultural benchmark for children's and young adult literature in the Catalan language. The award for children's literature, endowed with 6,000 euros, was presented at the Mezza Salon of the Hotel Icon in Barcelona. For its part, the 2026 Gran Angular Award, intended for young adult literature and which this year celebrated its 36th edition, has been declared void.

I wonder what it is that I like so much about this narrator, one of my favorite writers. Not one of his books has ever disappointed me! It doesn't matter if you read one of his novels or a collection of short stories: the style is unmistakable (short, sharp, elegant sentences; very penetrating psychological observations, always subtle). But the style of Patrick Modiano is also unmistakable, and, for me, the Frenchman is of very little interest. Peter Stamm's narrative situations—the setting, the spaces in which the action or thought unfolds—are very attractive to me: but so are those devised by Jonathan Franzen and Eider Rodríguez, for instance, and to me, the books of these two authors, while quite remarkable, do not move me as much as those of the Swiss writer.

The news that the poet Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel has a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy: just as some recent Nobels (like fellow poet Louise Glück, like Annie Ernaux, like Han Kang, or like the one from just the previous edition, László Krasznahorkai) constituted slight and pleasant surprises, Anne Carson's shines for its forcefulness. “Ah, right, Anne Carson,” the many thousands of readers of her verses around the world must have said. When I say that the aforementioned were “slight and pleasant surprises,” I mean that they were not entirely unexpected: they appeared in the Nobel “betting pools,” in the lists of authors nominated to receive the award, but perhaps in less visible spots on those lists. Not Anne Carson: Anne Carson had already been among the names heading them for years, and it is not out of place to imagine her, in recent years, waiting for the call from the Swedish Academy. A bit like Paul Valéry, who was among the candidates for twelve or thirteen years in a row, and every year, when the Nobel dates arrived, he would go for long walks to calm his nerves. He died without receiving it, precisely the year that the Swedish academics had decided –they said– to give it to him. Anne Carson has declared that she too will go out for a walk in the woods, but in her case “so as not to have to answer the phone; afterwards, we will enjoy the silence.”

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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