A little overshadowed by the enormous Carson McCullers and those teenage girl characters who wander through dusty towns full of criminal secrets while on the cusp of adulthood, Siri HustvedtFor her second novel, so far unpublished in Catalan, she created a nineteen-year-old Lily Dahl and placed her in a town in Minnesota (which couldn't have been very different from her own) where she serves coffee in the money that lies beneath her house as she observes the behavior of the regular customers. She's an aspiring actress, dreams of running away to the big city and making it big, but her reality is making scrambled eggs for Franck and Dick, a pair of brothers who are farmers and barely speak, or some bacon for Martin Petersen, a former childhood playmate who has become an ex-con. She has a neighbor who is a retired actress who helps her prepare for a role in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream And, above all, a tenant in the hotel across the street named Ed Shapiro, who is famous and incredibly handsome. At night, Lily secretly watches him paint, driven by his creative fever, and the erotic game soon begins.

We are what happens to us. We are what we want, we are what we lack. We are what those who love us or mistreat us make us. We are the place where we grew up. We are the places we have fled from and the places we have tried to reach. The protagonist-narrator ofWith rage in my bodyThe novel, by the French author Sorj Chalandon (1952), tells the story of a boy—a teenager, a young man: we see him grow up throughout the novel—who has suffered nothing but misfortune, who longed for a loving family but never had one, whom no one has ever loved, and whom many mistreat. In one instance, he is imprisoned in France. The institution's name is the House of Supervised Institution, and its official objective is to reform the inmates so they can work at sea or in the fields, but in practice, it is a hell where dehumanization and brutality prevail.

"When we think we write our readings, we are actually writing our lives," we read in Camera obscura cannon (Seix Barral), the new novel byEnrique Vila-Matas (Barcelona, ​​​​1948). The book, explained by someone who could be an android – the first to be incorporated into Vilamatian literature –, takes us into 48 hours of obsessive writing, motivated by the memory of a dead writer and the creation of a literary canon made from randomly chosen fragments of authors such as Robert Walser. Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth and Carlo Emilio Gadda.

"This novel has several origins, but the first was an early vocation to write that, however, did not find the time to grow," explained Benjamín G. Rosado (Ávila, 1985) this Thursday at noon in the Hall of Mirrors of the Gran Teatre del Liceu on the occasion of the awarding of the 67th Biblioteca Breve award, worth 30,000 euros, thanks to his first novel, The flight of man, in which the journalist, critic and cultural manager asks himself how fiction can change the plot of our lives. "I haven't written until now because of a lack of time, in my case, but because of attitude: at home literature has always been something very serious and I didn't feel capable of playing that role," continued Rosado, who to construct this story took a sabbatical year and travelled around some of the settings of the novel, from New York to Buenos Aires. "I did all this so as not to write anything about my own adventures," he specified, to avoid any link with autofiction. And he has described the story as "a Byzantine novel," in reference to some crucial elements of the book, such as "adventures and love."