In Teoria de gèneres, the second book by Josep Girós (Tarragona, 1968), the architect and writer focuses on a temptation as old as the human being: to classify what they do not understand. Literature does not escape this either: novel, poetry, essay, thriller, autobiography, science fiction... Genres, subgenres, labels or compartments that promise to guide us before opening a book and that, often, only serve to tell us what we should expect from them. Girós writes precisely against this need to put everything in its place. The author plays with the very idea of classifying until it wavers. And he does so with a paradox that runs throughout the book: he plays at classifying while questioning classification. Instead of accepting the academic divisions of genres, he proposes his own view, deliberately eccentric, and turns literary taxonomy into a playground. The book does not seek to resolve what a novel, a poem, or an essay is, but rather to ask why knowing it calms us. Classifying a book is also domesticating it: anticipating it, reducing its mystery. Girós seems to suspect that literature begins to lose something just at the moment we believe we have understood it. Theory of genres moves away from the solemn literary essay, the kind that seems to demand that the reader maintain a certain gravity even when talking about books. Here, there is no desire to build a definitive system or to erect a new Bible of classification. The proposal is more interesting when it resists being turned into doctrine. And here one of its best weapons appears: humor. Not as an ornament, but as a way of thinking. Girós uses the joke to dismantle the formality with which we often speak of literature and culture, this ridiculous need to turn any reading experience into an operation of prestige. Leave room for error and surprise

Theory of genres is less a manual than a provocation. It does not offer a compass so that the reader does not get lost, but rather suggests a much more uncomfortable idea: perhaps getting lost is, in fact, the best way to read. The paradox is delightful: to rebel against classifications, Girós must manufacture others (unfinished narratives, admirably incomprehensible narratives, narratives translated more than once into Catalan, etc.). The game also has rules, but these do not intend to imprison literature, but rather to demonstrate that every border is provisional, artificial, and revisable.This awareness saves Gender Theory from becoming a mere catalog of eccentricities. Beneath the game lies a deeper question: what happens when we stop reading to confirm what we already knew? In an era in which algorithms increasingly decide what we read, leaving room for error and surprise is almost an act of resistance. Josep Girós does not ask us to abandon genres, but rather not to turn them into borders. The most vibrant literature has always been a bit of a smuggler: it enters territories that do not belong to it, mixes registers, steals forms, and disobeys the labels that try to contain it. After all, the book starts from an apparently modest question and ends up touching on an essential issue: to what extent do we need to order the world to be able to inhabit it? Girós responds with a proposal that prefers the crack to the wall, curiosity to certainty, and disorder to the tranquility of having everything classified. Perhaps reading does not consist of knowing which shelf we should put a book on. Perhaps it consists of taking it off the shelf and seeing what happens.

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Although the humility and shyness that have always accompanied him make it difficult for him to express himself with much expansiveness, Maria Barbal (Tremp, 1949) is happy to have, since this September, a literary biography like the one dedicated to her by Carme Arenas (Granollers, 1954), Words for silence (Column). "Carme took an interest in my writing from very early on, and I am grateful to her that it was so. In the end, I ended up becoming one of the sources of documentation for her book —she admits with a minimal smile—. Although at first I resisted the project a little, I must recognize that I have ended up drawing benefits from it. It has helped me to become aware of the trajectory I have had, and also to remember from which people I come".

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"Dear Mercè: it has been a long time since we heard from you. What are you doing? Where are you? How are you? [...] As you can see I am [sic] in La Molina where I am taking a rest cure of chilling". This is the postcard that the painter and pedagogue Susina Amat i Juvé (Barcelona, 1912-1983) sent on July 20, 1971, from the Catalan Pyrenees, to Mercè Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908 - Girona, 1983), whom she had become friends with when they worked at the Propaganda Commissariat of the Generalitat, in the middle of the Civil War. The author, who at that time was finalizing one of her most emblematic novels, Broken mirror (1974), he replied to her from Vienna three weeks later to let her know about the difficult time he was going through: "I have been [sic] in Vienna for about four months, where a person very dear to me is dying little by little after a couple of brain surgeries".

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Year after year, the Week of Catalan Books is growing in every sense. In 2025, sales figures climbed to a record 820,000 euros – 15% more than the previous edition – it received more than 100,000 visitors and occupied 8,900 m², with 94 stands, 312 exhibitors, and the presence of 265 publishing houses from all Catalan-speaking territories. This year, the venue on Passeig Lluís Companys in Barcelona — a location the Week reclaimed during the America's Cup year, due to the sporting competition which prevented it from being held at Moll de la Fusta — will expand to 9,000 m², will feature 98 stands, 332 exhibitors, and 282 publishing houses.

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"Yes: in my second year of ESO I started / speaking Spanish / because the Catalans didn't get it / and because, as Sylvia Plath said, / every woman adores a fascist", writes Maria Sevilla Paris (Badalona, 1990) in one of the poems in Sylvia Plath, / every woman adores a fascist", writes Maria Sevilla Paris (Badalona, 1990) in one of the poems in Ni una o l'oposada flor (Arrebato Libros). On the left pages we read the original poems in Catalan. On the right, the Spanish version, which often becomes a transformative game, by Juan Andrés García Román and the author. Ni una o l'oposada flor explains, in a ductile and precise language, Sevilla's devotion to animals, plants, and all sorts of living organisms –including men–, while at the same time reflecting on her relationship with Catalan, which, although not the language her parents spoke to each other, has become her usual language, a professional tool – she is an associate professor at the University of Barcelona and runs workshops at the Casal dels Infants in Raval – and a vehicle for artistic expression, which has so far resulted in half a dozen books, including Dents de polpa (AdiA edicions, 2015), Plastilina (Fonoll, 2021), and La nit ovípara (Documents Documenta, 2024).

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For many current Catalan writers, shit is everything. I mean they call it that - generically, shit–, of the different kinds of shit there are in the world, as if it were all the same, either because they have no roots in the countryside (only shadows on the asphalt) or because they have not read enough (or at all) of their own literary tradition. Ramon Erra (Vic, 1966) is a rigorous writer, who has read well (and enough) and who has deep roots in the land. He knows that chicken manure is called hen, and for horse manure, there is only one name: we make. May the guano is the excrementitious matter of bats. It is not bullshit, what I say! Language is the raw material of the writer. Erra also knows what a piss-a-bed is, a wild cock (and he has even seen some!) and a drain – which he writes load, as it should be pronounced in their native region–, and knows how to distinguish between a wheat field and stubble.

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It was after a conversation with her eldest son that Ester Invernon (Mataró, 1973) decided to put all her eggs in the literature basket. "He had arrived home angry with the world, totally pre-teen, and I told him: 'Many days I don't like what I do and I put up with it,'" explains Invernon. That night she couldn't stop thinking about the phrase and, the next morning, while having breakfast, she announced to her family that she had decided to change her life. "I told them that in a year I would publish a book and I got to work on it," she recalls. Thus began the career of a writer who has already brought five novels to life – including Un estiu per estimar (La Campana, 2021) and Ningú ens va dir que seria fàcil (La Campana, 2023) – and has sold over 20,000 books. Her latest story, titled Després de tu, has now arrived in bookstores, and is disconnected from the Trilogia dels Albons which has established Invernon as a successful author in Catalan.

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This summer, which many of us have seen fires ravage our forests and where we don't know for sure if what we are experiencing is nature becoming unbalanced or, on the contrary, doing its best to rebalance itself; this summer Editorial Barcino has published a new edition of Liliana, by Apel·les Mestres (Barcelona, 1854-1936), and has given us the opportunity to re-evaluate a writer whom we should all know better. Personally, I would swear I had never read anything by him, although I had seen illustrations by him at the MNAC. I delved into his life a few months ago, when I was preparing the script for a podcast about classic authors that I present, La contracoberta. And since then I have been amazed not only by his pen, but also by everything he knew how to do well: drawing, painting, writing poetry, theatre, prose and music, translating and giving graphic illustration the artistic category it deserves.

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The victory of Spanish fascism in the civil war, the consequent Francoist dictatorship, and the continuity that, on identity and linguistic-cultural issues, has been given from so-called democratic institutions to Spanish nationalism with Francoist echoes, make it so that when we read the books and review the figure and life trajectory of Avel·lí Artís Gener “Tísner” or Vicenç Riera Llorca (Barcelona, 1903–Pineda de Mar, 1991) they seem to us of heroic and purest radicalism and coherence. Is it because we have put them on a pedestal or because we have objectively let ourselves be lowered?A staunch Catalanist and socialist of popular extraction and republican convictions, Riera Llorca, who declared himself a Catalan nationalist and therefore (not despite it: therefore) also an internationalist, made his name as a writer in the rich breeding ground of Catalan journalism during the years of the Republic. A polyglot and voracious reader, he dedicated himself to trade unionism and went to fight voluntarily at the front. After the republican defeat and the military occupation of Catalonia, Riera Llorca fled to France, where he was interned twice in concentration camps, from which he escaped both times. From there, he managed to flee to the Dominican Republic, and then to Mexico, where he co-founded and directed the most mythical and fertile exile magazine, Pont blau. He returned to Catalonia in 1969. The country had been deformed, Riera Llorca had not, and he continued to defend the same ideas he had before he had to leave. I have extracted this information from the very interesting study Vicenç Riera Llorca. Exile, memory and the working class, by Albert Ventura (Publicacions Universitat Rovira i Virgili).A chaotic, indolent and precarious world

The best-known title by Riera Llorca, Tots tres surten per l’Ozama, published in Mexico in 1946, now reissued by Club Editor, is a testimonial novel, between historical chronicle, journalistic reportage and expressively frontal and refined narration, about the experience of Catalan exile in the Dominican Republic of dictator Trujillo. Applying tones, perspectives, and technical lessons learned from reading the Americans Hemingway and Dos Passos, then very popular, Riera Llorca offers an exhaustive panorama, full of ellipses and not at all prolix but socio-anthropologically incisive, colorful and insightful, of a world marked by material misery, political corruption, racial prejudice, and passionate sensuality. It is a chaotic, static, indolent and precarious world that suddenly has to manage the arrival of many thousands of immigrants (Catalans, Spaniards, Jews, Italians...) from a Europe at war, and in which the three Catalan protagonists – Ramon, intellectual but worldly; Miquel, steadfast idealist; Lluís, conceited, boastful, soft – barely make a living doing jobs and little jobs, cohabiting with natives and other exiles, and thinking little or not at all about the past and all that they have left behind.Riera Llorca's literary operation, consisting in documenting from fiction – therefore, recreating not from literalness but from imagination – a concrete human experience in a specific historical period and territorial framework, still proves modern and lucid today. This is so because formally the novel has not become outdated and because the gallery of human types that parades through it is vivid and convincing, even in the cases of secondary and schematic characters.With a style that combines naturalist narration and reportage – vividness, drama, and symbolic power, but also detachment, clarity of style, and a desire for objectivity, as if everything were seen through the lens of a camera, although from time to time the narrator lets slip a judgmental adjective–, Tots tres surten per l’Ozama is a valuable work for literary, politico-historical, and human reasons. An important book.

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"Clementina Arderiu Voltas is surely one of the Catalan writers who has had the easiest and most difficult time leaving a work in the history of Catalan literature". With this forceful statement begins the profile that Marta Pessarrodona outlined the poet in the volume Donasses. Protagonists of modern Catalonia (Destination, 2006). Now that the fiftieth anniversary of Arderiu's death is being celebrated, it is worth asking what the reasons are for this contradictory situation – in the light and in the shadow at the same time – and trying to correct the wrong that has been done to his work, on which reductive judgments have weighed, for social and biographical reasons.

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Guillem Agulló was an 18-year-old Valencian nationalist, anti-fascist, and independentist who was murdered by a gang of Nazis in April 1993 in Montanejos (Alt Millars). His only crime was being known for his ideas by his murderer, Pedro Cuevas. Cuevas stabbed him in the heart. Death was almost instantaneous. The murderer and his gang left the scene singing the Cara al sol. This detail is important because, in the subsequent trial, a witness was forced to sing the well-known fascist anthem, theoretically to prove that it identified him correctly. It is just one of the many surreal elements present in the whole affair.And it is that the crime against Agulló opened the doors to an unspeakable process that masked the facts, excused the assassins and criminalized the Valencian nationalist and anti-fascist movement. All this is what the professor, writer and musician Rafa Xambó has been patiently investigating the professor, writer and musician Rafa Xambó for four long years. The result of this research is The murder of Guillem: lies, fascists and robes, a huge volume of more than 400 pages, with dense lettering, which explains how the Montanejos crime was treated in the precarious and colonized Valencian media ecosystem and what the judicial outcome of all this was.This volume is the culmination of a series of initiatives of different types that have kept the case hot over the last decades. I am talking about the novel Guillem, by Núria Cadenes (Amsterdam Llibres, 2020) or the film La mort de Guillem, by Carlos Marqués-Marcet (2020). This latter title was broadcast by the televisions of Catalonia, Valencian Country, and the Balearic Islands, and achieved figures of more than 600,000 viewers in total.Xambó, however, does not fictionalize. His has been a work of newspaper archives and of looking closely at the judicial summary. His conclusions are unassailable: after the crime, the main local newspaper, Las Provincias, launched a brutal campaign to excuse the assassins, attributing it all to a “youth brawl” (sic). The other media outlets (including Canal 9) also played an incomplete and unprofessional role, but the newspaper from the capital city took the prize.The end of a convulsive transition in the Valencian Country

For those who do not know the history of Las Provincias, it will be necessary to explain that the newspaper founded in 1866 by Teodor Llorente (patriarch of the Valencian Renaixença) was the main agent, since 1979, for the promotion of anti-Catalanism in Valencia and the criminalization of nationalism. Agulló's episode, in reality, was the cherry on a rotten cake that had been poisoning Valencian society for twenty years. At its head, the sadly famous María Consuelo Reyna.In reality, the stab in the heart against Guillem Agulló represents, in a way, the end of the convulsive Transition in the Valencian Country. A period of unpunished crimes (the bombings of Joan Fuster and other intellectuals, aggressions against democratic authorities...) which Xambó takes care to recall so that we are not at all surprised by the ridiculous conviction of Pedro Cuevas with which the trial that took place in Castelló de la Plana was settled.As a sardonic epilogue to this story, it will be necessary to note what Pedro Cuevas did – the kid who claims he killed Agulló for esoteric, juvenile, and testosteronic reasons – after serving the four years in prison to which he was sentenced. He immediately joined the FAS (Antisystem Front) and was implicated in Operation Panzer. In this raid, the Civil Guard dismantled a neo-Nazi cell with weapons and propaganda that was dedicated to the hunt for anti-fascists and immigrants.This is how history is written, undoubtedly...

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"In this solitary environment, in this infinite desert today populated by men of all the world's lineages, we Catalans also arrive, in the thousands (...) We leave Barcelona without being aware of what we are leaving or what we will find upon arrival... and the arrival at the great city of La Plata is sad... for the emigrant." These words summarize the deep longing felt, for years, by Enric Martí i Muntaner (Vilanova i la Geltrú, 1889-Buenos Aires, 1954): although he left for Argentina at the beginning of the 20th century with the aim of making his fortune, he only managed to survive in the middle of the Pampa for almost three decades, and guided by love for his country – and, above all, for his language – he undertook the verse translation of an emblematic poem by José Hernández, Martín Fierro (1872), which he managed to publish in 1936, after several vicissitudes.

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The life of the economist, politician, and writer Antoni Vives (Barcelona, 1965) took a radical turn when, in 2018, he landed in Saudi Arabia to meet with the country's prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and the team with which he was preparing Vision 2030, which was to translate into the urbanization of a region in the middle of the desert "the size of Belgium" called Neom – which integrates the words new and future– to build "a city designed for nine million inhabitants" in the middle of the desert. He has now decided to explain the seven years he spent leading that mammoth project in a memoir literary and very interesting, In the secret country (Pòrtic, 2026), which does not hide the contradictions of an absolute monarchy guided by Sharia, capable of having a journalist critical of the regime murdered and dismembered as Jamal Khashoggi and which, at the same time, has the aspiration to modernize itself. Vives's own trajectory will surprise more than one reader. In addition to winning the Crexells prize with Farringdon Road's Dream (La Magrana, 2011) and the Bookseller with And tomorrow, paradise (RBA, 2014), has been deputy mayor for Urbanism between 2011 and 2015 at Barcelona City Council —during Xavier Trias's last term— and in 2022 was sentenced to two years in prison, settled with a compensation of 155,000 euros, for irregular contracting of the then mayor of Santa Coloma de Cervelló, Jesús Arévalo, by the entity Barcelona Regional, which Vives had chaired.

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Up to now, and for almost thirty years, we have known Josep Pedrals (Barcelona, 1979) as a poet, a performer, a lecturer, and a cultural manager. With Poeticismes (Arcàdia, 2026), he debuts as an essayist with the same combination of pleasantness, erudition, and humor that abounds in his verses. In the catch-all drawer that is Pedrals' new book, we find reflections on emperors buried in honey or on the monument to Jacint Verdaguer on Passeig de Sant Joan, chronicles of some of the thousands of recitals in which he has participated around the world —like the one that took him to Macedonia accompanied by Adam Zagajewski—, vindications of authors less known to readers than they should be, and a wealth of curious technical speculations on poetry writing, one of his great passions, along with omnivorous reading and a love for the stage.

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The Fundació Prudenci Bertrana has made public the four literary awards it presents annually: the Prudenci Bertrana novel award has gone to Fer cantar els arbres, by Jordi Campoy; the Miquel de Palol poetry award to Horografia, by Joan Tomàs Martínez Grimalt; the Carles Rahola essay award to Terra de Quixots, by Joan Manuel Soldevilla, and the Ramon Muntaner youth novel award, finally, has been won by La fuga, by Laia Aguilar.

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"Like a happy castaway, / in October twenty-six, / the thirtieth day, Ramon arrives in the world, / in Barcelona. / Without making much fuss. He is the ninth child". This is how the ballad dedicated by Joan Vilamala to Ramon Folch i Camarasa (1926-2019) begins, one of the key authors of the literary revival in Catalan that started in the late 1950s, alongside Manuel de Pedrolo, Maria Aurèlia Capmany, and Josep Maria Espinàs.

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For decades, Biel Mesquida (Castelló de la Plana, 1947) has been inviting readers to delve into all the nuances of the "censored perfume" of freedom, whether sexual or political. On the evening he received the 58th Premi d'Honor de les Lletres Catalanes, the verses of Lluita de classes, one of the agile and radiant poems from El bell país on els homes desitgen els homes –written in 1974 but unpublished until 1985–, once again resonated at the Palau de la Música with the elegant diction of the poet Adrià Targa. "You are a creature, fierce creature, playing with my hips, / biting them, while I knelt, pushed and compelled by your frenzy and / this desire to sink into the beautiful hole of my anus": thus, the urgent connection between the lyrical self and the "disheveled boy" of the commissions still sounds forcefully, an oasis of free love amidst the national-Catholic and Francoist darkness.

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It seems to us that we are reading an entertaining novel, with a young character, in his twenties, and without a penny in his pocket, who goes with a lily in his hand and doesn't stop walking (especially due to lack of money): what has always been called a coming-of-age novel or apprenticeship novel. In reality, however, it is an ambitious chronicle, with some episodes with a lot of spice, starring this passionate pilgrim (godless) who decided to risk everything on the gamble of becoming a poet-writer. An admirer of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom he draws much inspiration, and of William Shakespeare and François Villon. Born in La Selva del Camp in 1882, a bastard son, repudiated by his father (which will mark him deeply), self-taught, often scorned for his lack of academic culture. Of a timid disposition (“The old timidity of the Ferreters put into the blood”). For this reason, despite loving books madly, the protagonist – the author himself, Puig i Ferreter, with no additions – advocates, convinced, for lived culture before learned culture: “This is how I have always used reality to turn it into art. Not by hunting for documents with a notebook in hand, but by taking advantage of the ‘things’ I have lived or that have impressed me deeply and have remained within me with all their colors, in that depth of human experience which, transposed by imagination and fantasy, is the vital treasure of the artist”.

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Colm Tóibín (Enniscorthy, 1955), to be able to say his piece about Mercè Rodoreda –an author he has been reading for decades–, has found a gap in his extremely tight schedule and has crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Los Angeles. The author of novels such as Brooklyn and The Magician –both in Catalan from the Amsterdam publishing house– has been the last guest of the exhibitionRodoreda, a forest, which closed its doors a few days ago at the CCCB. 81,880 people have visited it since December, a milestone that has made it the seventh most visited exhibition in the history of the Barcelona venue and the most successful one focused on literature, surpassing those programmed for Claudio Magris, Salvador Espriu and W.G. Sebald.

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Although she hasn't lost hope of becoming a "skater, pianist, dancer, and screenwriter for Larry David," Marta Pasqual (Girona, 1983) combines teaching in secondary school, where she teaches French literature, with writing novels as interesting as L'àngel que em mira (Empúries, 2026), the third she has published since debuting in fiction with El malaventurat senyor Clauss (Empúries, 2022). After winning the Just M. Casero prize with La casa dels caps de setmana (Empúries, 2023), Pasqual presents a story centered on a 60-year-old family man, Isaac, who suffers a domestic accident that leaves him in a coma. This starting point allows the author to combine the account of this decisive moment in the protagonist's life with the flood of memories, both good and painful, that visit him during his convalescence.

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