Some books are written to create literature, while others are written because they simply cannot be left unwritten, because the author needs to confront some ghost that haunts them or exorcise some demon that torments them. This doesn't mean, however, that these latter books aren't also written with literary intent. Such is the case of... Hunger, a mixture of personal memoir, medical chronicle, and desperate cry by the translator, narrator, and poet Núria Busquet Molist (Cardedeu, 1974). It is not true that honesty doesn't exist in literature. It does. It just so happens that honesty also requires the strategies of formalization and artifice. Literary screams and vomiting—Busquet uses both similes to describe her book—are also a matter of style.

Since publishing Olive Kitteridge In 2008 –with which she won the Pulitzer and, later, the Llibreter prize–, the American Elizabeth Strout (Portland, Maine, 1956) has persisted in exploring his own fictional universe, populated by characters stunned by guilt and burdened by family setbacks, but also convinced that there must be some hope for tomorrow. Explain everything to me, published in Catalan, like the seven previous novels, in Edicions de 1984 –In her novels, translated on this occasion by Núria Busquet and Molist, Strout brings together the three great families of her sober and irremediably curious narrative about human beings: the Burgess brothers, the writer Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, who is now ninety years old. Despite living in a community of retirees, she refuses to leave that world.