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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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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Sometimes I fantasize about writing under a pseudonym. In fiction, it would allow me to tackle subjects that, for personal reasons, are forbidden to me (if I were to write about them, the consequences in real life would be too significant), and it would also save me a lot of promotional work and, therefore, a lot of insults on social media (we know that no matter what you say in interviews, there's always a reel that will hit the nail on the head: we live in a world with an excessive tendency to hit the nail on the head); in essay writing, a pseudonym would give me the freedom not to remain silent or censor myself (I assure you that often, or even almost always, I bite my tongue; after all, repression is a mechanism of social origin). I fantasize about the idea of not signing my texts, but I immediately realize that this has two problems. The first is that I suspect it wouldn't be difficult to realize it's me; after all, everyone has their thematic, lexical, syntactic, idiosyncratic obsessions, etcetera, what is called a unique voice, so if you haven't hidden behind a false name from the beginning, it will be difficult to start doing so halfway through, at least in a natural way, because, of course, if you have to make a great effort so that it's not noticed that it's you, perhaps everything, by not having truth even for the author, will already be flawed from the start.Imagining that I could overcome the obstacle of being identified, the second problem still remains: in fiction, it would imply that one would have to break new ground from scratch and surely fewer books would sell initially (not that I sell many now, don't think so), so everything would become economically (even) more precarious, even more so because a good part of a writer's income derives from satellite work: book clubs, talks, and the like; in the case of writing articles, the problem would be that I imagine that at least part of the interest in my articles derives from who I am: from the work I do, the background I have, the place I occupy in the world. I believe that when we read an opinion, an insult, or a digression on any topic, it is interesting to know who is talking to us, in order to better appreciate the virtues and biases it will have (let's be realistic: we all have them). So I fantasize and then abandon the idea.Is criticism insincere in our country?

All this comes in the wake of the (slight) dust raised by this magazine called No té nom, which defines itself as "a platform for honest and rigorous cultural criticism with a key difference from conventional media: the use of pseudonyms". Behind it is a foundation and a editorial board with names and surnames (Enric Borràs, Marçal Girbau, Enric Virgili and Anna Tort), who are the ones who filter articles signed with false names. In their manifesto, they affirm that in our country criticism is, in general, insincere, that it lacks in-depth analysis and that it is too marked by egos, self-censorship and cronyism.

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The richest (and most entertaining to observe) literary intelligences are usually the most tentacular, that is, those that touch on many subjects, use a broad and varied palette of interests and resources, and are fed by sufficiently diverse influences. Tentacular literary intelligences, naturally, can only prove themselves to be so if they are accompanied by an equally tentacular literary talent. Better said: versatile. We would find exceptions, but I would say that in general only authors who write well, with expressiveness, precision, and depth, in all kinds of genres and formats can think and explore well, with insight, rigor, and originality, all kinds of subjects. Isaac Bashevis Singer (Radzymin, Poland, 1904 - Surfside, United States, 1991), the most prestigious figure in modern Yiddish literature, Nobel Prize in Literature 1978, author of novels, short stories, children's literature, and thousands of journalistic articles, was a prolific and considerably eclectic writer. The eighteen articles or brief essays that make up the volume Old Truths, New Clichés, originally written in Yiddish, translated into English under the meticulous supervision of the author himself and now translated for the first time into Catalan by Mar Vidal, amply confirm this eclecticism.Among the influences that Bashevis Singer acknowledges are “the Torah and the sacred books”, the philosophy of Spinoza and Hume, the Kabbalistic texts of venerable rabbis, the works of the most colossal giants of 19th-century French and Russian novel writing (Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy), the occultism of Conan Doyle and Flammarion... His interests are equally surprisingly gymnastic, ranging from the Jewish diaspora and Zionism to artistic postmodernity, which he criticizes and despises without using the term. We can also add: Soviet totalitarianism; children's literature; the past, present and future situation of the Yiddish language; the Jewish reality in old Central Europe and the raison d'être of Hasidic Jews in the New York neighborhood of Williamsburg; the fire of faith and the possibilities of mysticism; the hopes of humanism and the dangers and limitations of rationalism...A divided life

All in all, I believe it reveals the profile of an intellectual who is very old and at the same time very modern, who also had a life split in both the intimate and biographical plane as well as the cultural and intellectual plane. Son of an orthodox rabbi, Bashevis Singer was saved from a more or less certain death at the hands of the Nazis when, in 1935, he fled Poland to go into exile in the United States, where for decades he built a literary work in which, especially when he wrote fiction, he recovered, preserved, and recreated the daily life of the shtetl. This multiple split could have disoriented and denatured him as a writer. Instead, it conferred upon him a cosmopolitanism without pretension, almost against his will, the imagined and deliberate rootedness of someone who has been uprooted, which made him a reclusive traditionalist who was at the same time open and very modern.He says so in one of the most interesting articles in the volume, titled Yiddish, the language of exile: “People must be at the same time themselves and part of a whole, faithful to their home and their origins and deeply respectful of the origins of others”. And he adds: “For the Yiddish artist, yesterday is as real as today: those who died are not dead, destroyed cities still teem with life”. It is one of the most fascinating aspects of Bashevis Singer, the naturalness with which he interprets the double role he feels he must play, the grace and skill with which he carries out the double mission he has set for himself: to be the custodian of a secular and traditionalist legacy without diluting or relativizing it and at the same time to make it live in modern society, the world of atomic energy, technological advances, dissolute morality, art and culture understood as a chaotic and vibrant mêlée in which everything seems to be valid and everything seems possible.At times pompous and naive, at times sharp-wittedly malicious –“at no other time has a lack of talent operated with so many theories as in ours”–, often with haughty but also generous and magnanimous wisdom, Isaac Bashevis Singer is a singular and tragically unrepeatable writer.

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Liadan Ní Chuinn (Northern Ireland, 1998) is the pseudonym of a writer – who also does not reveal their gender or allow themselves to be photographed – who has revolutionized the English publishing market with their debut. Encara hi sou tots (La Segona Perifèria / Feltrinelli) collects six unsettling and striking stories about the still-open wound of the Northern Ireland conflict in today's society. Translated into Catalan by Ariadna Pous, the book deeply portrays the silences that beat within Irish families and that, despite the passage of time, have become a festering pain passed down from generation to generation. The interview with ARA is a conversation by email.

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In June I have my birthday and this year I received many books, which always makes me happy. One of them has been Principi, mig, fi, by Valeria Luiselli (translated into Catalan by Elisabet Ràfols Sagués, at Angle Editorial). I haven't finished it yet, but I can already say that I am enjoying it very much. At one point, Luiselli collects some reflections from the poet Layli Long Soldier, who talks about writing in terms of a relationship, as if it were a person, in the sense that it has conditions that make it possible and strengthen it: reciprocity, generosity, time, and patience. And others that can damage it. It is not the most worn-out metaphor of talent and discipline, but that of a bond that needs to be cared for and that, like all, can be damaged.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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