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 The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the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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Amitav Ghosh (Calcutta, 1956), one of India's most important fiction writers, has for many years placed his pen at the service of climate activism. Ten years ago he published in English The great derangement: climate change and the unthinkable (now available in Spanish published by Capitán Swing with the title El gran delirio. Cambio climático y lo impensable). As he explained these days in the CCCB debates, Ghosh understands this "great derangement" as a collective disorder that makes us all incapable of assuming the gravity and reacting adequately to the climate emergency. An incapacity that he particularly denounces within literature.

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Like someone watching an animal documentary, I have observed with interest three things that have happened in recent months in the French literary market, a traditionally protectionist market that has managed to defend itself, in part, from Anglo-Saxon cultural colonizations and which, for this reason, I furiously envy.The first noteworthy news is that at the beginning of March this year it was announced that Amazon would be a "partner" of the Paris Book Fair; by partner they obviously meant that it would put a lot of money into it. For a while now, our neighbors have had a tug-of-war with Amazon: since 2023, a law has imposed a minimum shipping fee of three euros for book shipments (I read that Urtasun recently said they are studying doing something similar in our country). The fact is that Amazon interprets, very conveniently, that if the book is delivered to a locker, this fee does not need to be applied. The discussion is served, of course. That Amazon is a threat to bookstores is nothing new (I agree with what Oriol Soler said recently on this, although thinking that Amazon is our only problem seems reductive and a bit misleading); what is new is that following the announcement of Amazon's sponsorship, the French Booksellers Association decided to stand up and withdraw from the Fair on the grounds that Amazon has predatory and hegemonic aspirations that are a danger to everyone in the sector: authors, publishers, and booksellers. I am pleased to see the fighting spirit of the French and I wonder what would happen if this had taken place in our country. I get the impression that we would have swallowed it whole, because we are always short on audacity and full of fears, and perhaps also because the links in our system are weaker than the French ones. The fact is that following the controversy, Amazon decided to withdraw from the Book Fair. Sometimes, standing up yields results: let's tattoo it on ourselves so we don't forget it.The second noteworthy fact is that this year the Paris Fair has not counted on the main imprints of Hachette, which I would say is the French publisher with the largest market share (similar or higher than that of the Planeta group in Spain, if AI does not deceive me). Not only has it not gone, but it set up a small alternative festival on its own during the month of March. This confirms that we must not only fear the big international groups but also the national ones, as the predatory and hegemonic will affects us all. The controversy at Grasset publishing house

The third event that interested me is what happened with the Grasset imprint, which is precisely one of Hachette's most important. There they publish (they used to publish) authors like Virginie Despentes, Vanessa Springora, Sorj Chalandon, Bernard-Henri Lévy or Pascal Bruckner; they and 110 more authors made public an open letter in Libération announcing that, following the dismissal of Olivier Nora (the historic editor of Grasset for twenty-six years), they would no longer sign with Grasset. 115 authors, oh my god!, and another fifty have since joined the protest. I am almost convinced that the authors from here would have resigned ourselves to it and moved on, although, of course, in private we would have complained to exhaustion: that's how we are, in private we say everything (praise and blame) but in public we keep quiet like no one else. All of Grasset's mess has its trigger in the owner, Vincent Bolloré, a magnate who with his millions dedicates himself to promoting far-right ideas, for example, through Europe 1, the most important private radio in France which – oh, what a coincidence – decided to buy shortly before the French elections. We can already imagine that the billionaire has not ruffled a single hair over the departure of this hundred or so authors who consider Nora's departure an "unacceptable attack on editorial independence and creative freedom" and who refuse to "be hostages of an ideological war that seeks to impose authoritarianism on culture and the media"; Bolloré has not been moved because we can deduce that literature, in fact, doesn't give a damn about it. All of this is, without a doubt, very sad and discouraging news. And what do we do with all this? On the one hand, we should look at it closely and follow it with attention, because as that saying goes about the neighbor's beard, perhaps we should start soaking ours. On the other hand, it would be advisable to become aware that keeping quiet and swallowing is not always the best strategy, that resistance is sometimes not only necessary but also useful, that the collective has a strength that the individual does not have, etcetera. Well, perhaps it would be useless and it would be better to stay on the couch sprawled out watching documentaries, because there are plenty for all tastes: in some the zebra always succumbs to the lion, in others a buffalo charges a predator with a horn thrust, and in some there are even fish that join together forming a swirl to confuse and save themselves from the worst of their predators.

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One of the most admirable achievements of Catalan playwrights in exile is their persistence in continuing to write theatre, despite knowing almost for certain that they would never see it performed in Catalonia. Ambrosi Carrion (Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, 1888–Cornellà de Conflent, 1973) was one of its foremost exponents. With about fifteen unpublished stage texts, Carrion also cultivated poetry and essay writing and built a literary career of over 30 works. Despite this, only one of his plays written in exile has been performed in Catalonia –La dama de Reus (Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, 2008)– and his name has remained in the shadows for decades. With the intention of making him present and vindicating him, Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona has published Teatre inèdit de l'exili, a volume containing three unpublished works by Carrion, prepared by professors Josep Camps Arbós and Francesc Foguet Boreu.

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Even with the memory of having lived "the unforgettable experience" of her first Sant Jordi, Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir (Reykjavik, 1958) strolls through the garden of Club Editor, the publishing house that has already published three of her unclassifiable novels, where an unwavering faith in the human race shines. Accustomed to the volcanic landscape of Iceland, Ólafsdóttir cannot help but marvel at the ease with which trees and flowers of all kinds grow in southern Europe, the setting of her best-known novel, Rosa candida –available in some thirty languages–, until now unpublished in Catalan, translated by Macià Riutort, as well as La veritat sobre la llum and Edèn, with which she won the Llibreter prize 2025.

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For a long time, Gil Pratsobrerroca (Vic, 1996) dreamed that he wanted to be a writer without knowing if he would succeed. "I've always loved writing a lot, since I was little. In school I entered the Sant Jordi contests and then it became a hobby. When I have a free afternoon, I often start writing. It's a process that relaxes me: I don't have to fight with anyone and I make all the decisions," explains the writer, who with El joc del silenci (La Campana) has become one of the big winners of this Sant Jordi. The thriller, with which he debuted in September, has been the second best-selling Catalan fiction book of the Diada behind Regina Rodríguez Sirvent, who has triumphed with Crispetes de matinada, from the same publisher, and who three years ago had a similar journey with her first book, Les calces al sol.

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Dear Regi, I should be angry, envious, and resentful of you for many reasons. Your book Les calces al sol (La campana) and my Un cor de neu (La Magrana) were released together in September 2022, and yours, slowly but surely, succeeded, and mine, well, it didn't. And this is despite yours being the first book you published, not like me who has published a few. On top of that, you're quite a bit younger than me. And a good person. And talented and wonderful and hardworking and persistent. And stylish! According to the manual for a good follower of the patriarchal cliché, I should choke every time I read something about you. But the opposite happens to me.

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

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

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The dragon is one of the quintessential fantastic animals in the history of literature. Its power has fascinated millions of readers, young and old, spurred by the creativity of novelists and poets from all over, but the image it presents has been changing: the dragon can be menacing, dangerous, and violent, although also, on some occasions, benign and compassionate, and can even possess a wisdom superior to that of humans. "I am fire. I am death," proclaims Smaug, the imposing and fearsome dragon with whom Bilbo Baggins must verbally contend in The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Never give up, and sooner or later you will find good luck," recommends Fuixur, the majestic white dragon, to the intrepid Atreyu in The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende. For Ursula K. Le Guin, who expanded and renewed the abilities of these enigmatic animals in the Earthsea novel cycle, dragons represent the human capacity to imagine: "If dragons frighten us it is because we tend to consider the works of imagination as suspicious or even despicable," the author defended in the article Why, as Americans, are we afraid of dragons? (1974).

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Can we live with our dead present without them tormenting us, especially considering that some as significant as the older sister or father have committed suicide? This is one of the driving questions of A Truce That Is Not Peace, the new book by Miriam Toews (Steinbach, 1964), published in Catalan by Les Hores, translated by Octavi Gil Pujol. In the hands of many writers, the autobiographical material she unfolds would be mired in the swamp of traumas. The Canadian author, however, knows how to combine sadness and longing with a surprising sense of humor. She can just as easily rescue an anecdote from the Mennonite Christian community where she grew up as recall a funny family episode from the past – such as the robbery in Ecuador –, mention a book that has recently interested her, and draw the reader into her current reality: the author has had a small house built on the property where her mother, one of her daughters, her partner, and their two children live.

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“Salvador Espriu Castelló, writer, single, sixty years old, a native of Santa Coloma de Farners [...]. He declares that he in no way wishes to be buried in the cemetery of Arenys de Mar. He further declares his express wish that his body be cremated, if the laws permit”. These are verbatim words, handwritten by Salvador Espriu in what is a document of last wishes, a draft of a will, written at some point between the summer of 1973 and that of 1974 – he was born on July 10, 1913 –, drafted in Spanish – the law did not provide for any other option – and addressed to his great friend and lawyer Josep Ferrer i Rius.

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For Sant Jordi, there is life beyond the best-selling books, publishing phenomena, and circumstantial trends. You just need to take a stroll through a well-run bookstore to verify that the good health of the Catalan publishing sector lies in the explosive diversity of proposals and in the quality and demand of many of these proposals. We choose just ten that we believe would be worth reaching more readers.

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“Before, I wanted to change the world. Now I am aware that I cannot. What I can do, at least, is help a small portion of this unsalvageable world”, explains Quinny Martínez Hernández (Colombia, 1979), poet, activist and director of FILMIG, the Itinerant Migrant Book Fair, which celebrates its third edition from April 13 to 18 in Barcelona in various venues, such as the Casinet d’Hostafrancs Civic Center – where the fairgrounds are located – or the Gabriel García Márquez and Sant Pau-Santa Creu libraries. All the activities of the event, which include from discussions to film screenings or a closing concert, are free. The team has never considered charging admission, because they follow the principles of the social and solidarity economy.

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The one million euros of the first Aena Award for Hispano-American Narrative has finally gone to the book of disturbing and dystopian short stories, El buen mal, by the Argentine author Samanta Schweblin, published by Seix Barral. The award, better endowed than the Nobel Prize in Literature and matching the Planeta Prize, was the icing on the cake of a gala as lavish as it was extravagant, held at the Museu Marítim de Barcelona with five live performances based on each finalist book and with most attendees dressed in "relaxed elegance," as requested on the invitation.

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We know that there are journeys that cross geographies and journeys that cross consciences. In the former, the gaze is fixed on the destination; in the latter, deeper and more silent, thought evidences the outcome of the world, a dark and hidden world that is revealed with each step. Extinction is an immersion into the bernhardian universe, into a deep place where lucidity and vertigo are confused. When Thomas Bernhard (Heerlen, Netherlands, 1931 - Austria, 1989) publishes Extinction. A Descent in 1986, he has taken his writing to the limit. It is his last novel, the most extensive, the most radically closed and suffocating, like a windowless room where the air has been slowly consumed. That we can read it today in Catalan is thanks to the translation by Clara Formosa Plans, and Quid Pro Quo Edicions' commitment to demanding authors who enrich our spirit.The work consists of two parts: The telegram and The will. In the first, Franz-Josef Murau, self-exiled in Rome, receives a telegram: “Parents and Johannes dead in accident. Caecilia, Amalia”. The news of the death of his parents and brother in a trivial accident due to chance does not apparently represent a great catastrophe for him, but it forces him to return to Wolfsegg, the family castle, a place where the spirit is destroyed with methodical efficiency. The return becomes a condemnation and unleashes a mental avalanche of memories, judgments, insults, guilt, reproaches, and hatreds. Murau gives himself over to an inextinguishable obsessive rhetoric with a single purpose: to use language as a tool for extinction. Wolfsegg is not only a decadent aristocratic rural estate, but a machine for the destruction of the mind and for submission, where its five libraries are locked up, a refuge for subsidized Catholic National Socialist hunters. Wolfsegg is Austria itself, with its outdated nobility and its oppressive national Catholicism. When Murau decides to symbolically destroy Wolfsegg, there is no redemption, only the final gesture of a condemned man.Talk to destroy

Murau speaks. He speaks to destroy. But every sentence that wants to free him chains him more deeply to what he hates. And here the characters must be considered. The mother, a fierce administrator of domestic resentment, is a fanatical Catholic manipulator. The father, a political opportunist, a powerful industrialist and a National Socialist sympathizer. Johannes, the brother, an anodyne and obedient being, destined to perpetuate the comedy. And the sisters Amalia and Caecilia, emblems of family decay, who are copies without an original. We still find a brother-in-law, the maker of wine bottle stoppers, a petty bourgeois who, with his insubstantiality and mental weakness, wanders through Wolfsegg during the funeral. On the other hand, we have Archbishop Spadolini, the high official of the Vatican Curia, admired and hated, who represents the sophisticated and international version of religious power. A functionary of the spirit. Fortunately, there is the beloved and admired Uncle Georg, the narrator's mentor, the guide who liberates Morau from this disgusting and oppressive world. And also Gambetti, the narrator's Roman student, a friend and sole interlocutor. And Maria, the brilliant poet, a literary transfiguration of Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom he maintains a relationship of admiration and dependence. The author uses the figure of Gambetti as a conversationalist, but in fact there is no dialogue. Bernhard had already brought this structure to the theatre, both in Ritter, Dene, Voss (1984)and in Plaza de los héroes (1988), imposing a central voice that speaks before presences that cannot contradict it. Extinction, therefore, takes the form of a bare stage, with a single actor under the spotlight, a spotlight that burns and does not go out. And as always, the wealth of an unparalleled narrative style: obsessive repetition, circular rhythm, the sentence that returns again and again over the same wound, turning prose into a relentless hypnotic music. A language that advances like a sawmill. This is the author's most stripped-down work, the most devoid of narrative curtains and closest to the act of thinking against oneself. Only a subterranean, dry, and cruel comic element prevents the text from sinking into pure despair. To read Thomas Bernhard one must accept a discipline: to renounce entertainment and endure the harshness of raw thought. Because with him there is no catharsis or comfort, only a form of terrible clarity, a fierce lucidity that cleanses like an acid and that forces the reader to examine themselves thoroughly, with no possibility of looking at the origin again with innocence. Extinction, therefore, is not a novel to be loved, but a work written to abolish self-deception.

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The "rural and polygonal" Basque Country of the 90s is resurrected in Pleibac, the second novel by Miren Amuriza (Berriz, 1990) which Pau Joan Hernàndez has translated into Catalan for Club Editor with grace and skill, to which he has added the transgressive linguistic vocation of the original. The book tells the story of friendship and betrayal between two adolescents, Jone and Polly, who grow up in the same Biscayan municipality where the author followed the family tradition of singing improvised verses in Basque. Years after establishing herself as a bertsolari and publishing several poetry collections, Amuriza tried her hand at prose in Basa (Elkar, 2019; in Spanish by Consonni), and now repeats the experience with a novel that flows down like a fresh beer after a party with friends.

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When you've read an author with admiration, you end up loving them, and that's why for many readers of Julian Barnes it will be difficult to start reading Farewells (Editorial Angle) without feeling a pang in my heart. Before even starting it, we already know that this is the last book we will read by the author. He has made this explicit, both in the title and in the interviews he has given. Barnes is eighty years old, ill, and doesn't want to leave a book unfinished, so, with a serenity not without irony, he decided that this was the end of his literary career.

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The writer, playwright, and poet Gonçalo M. Tavares (Luanda, Angola, 1970), celebrated by critics and readers as one of the great voices of Portuguese and European literature, has won the Formentor Prize for Literature. The jury highlighted that in the last twenty-five years he "has built a literary oeuvre of powerful personality, dazzling originality, and vigorous imagination," which includes more than forty titles. A professor of literature at the University of Lisbon, he debuted in 2001 with the verses of Book of Dance Since then, he has built a prolific and unique body of work, exploring all literary genres, translated into more than fifty languages ​​and published in seventy countries. He is the third most translated Portuguese author, after Fernando Pessoa and José María Eza de Queiroz.

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The 7lletres literary prize is entering a new phase with a name change intended to reinforce its identity and cultural ambition. The 21st edition, presented at Concabella Castle, officially adopts the name 7letres. Manuel de Pedrolo Short Story Prize, a decision that explicitly links the award to the writer from Aranyó and strengthens its position within the Catalan literary scene. The presentation on Monday brought together representatives from the Segarra County Council, the Cervera City Council, the Els Plans de Sió Town Council, and the Tàrrega Town Council—the four institutions that promote the project and have renewed their collaboration agreement. This image of institutional unity reinforces a model of cultural cooperation that, from a local perspective, has successfully consolidated an initiative launched in 2006 with the aim of honoring Pedrolo and, at the same time, stimulating contemporary creative writing.

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