That a novel of the importance ofBelovedThe fact that it was never translated into Catalan is one of those things that infuriates. How many future writers could have seen themselves reflected in them if the publishing system had done its job more than thirty years ago? And, much more importantly, how many readers would have raised the bar of their reading comprehension and wouldn't be seduced by any bound nonsense lining the new releases shelves? Reading books of the quality and complexity ofBelovedIt acts as an antidote to banal and commonplace literature. Reading it in Esther Tallada's magnificent translation is, moreover, a luxury.

The new novel byEva Baltasar (Barcelona, ​​1978), FishIt contains powerful ideas, conveyed through consistently sharp, often pithy phrases. And there's one fundamental one, so illustrative it illustrates perfectly: "It's as if Victoria, instead of loving me, had infected me. As if love were a transmission and not a creation." I think this is the crux of the matter. FishThe love between the two protagonists is experienced by one of them—the narrator—as a transmission—infectious, not beneficial. There is, therefore, no shared creation, but rather domination and submission. The lover, besides being an enigma, is excessive in every way. In fact, physically, he is already gigantic when compared to the other. Outside of his hands: curiously, his are smaller.

The declassified files of this despicable and sordid human being known as Jeffrey Epstein confirm a terrible truth that a few of us had long suspected: that the world imitates the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Miquel de Palol more than the other way around.

Bernat and Bárbara, the two protagonists of this story, often ask themselves: what are we doing in this world? And they don't have the answer, although they have learned to live their lives turning their backs on the barbarity of our time, covering their ears amidst the unpleasant and deafening noise of the world, blindfolding themselves to the pervasive ugliness of so many things (and so many souls, to put it bluntly, especially if you don't stray far from the lands bathed by the Mediterranean (the "tired landscape," as they call it). They recently retired, and they have known each other since they were seventeen. In other words, they have spent their whole lives together, and, as they have grown older, they have increasingly embraced that way of life described by the philosopher Josep Maria Esquirol. defined it as intimate resistanceThe resilient couple barely use screens. Decades ago, they found their paradise on Earth in a little-known—and uncrowded—department in neighboring France, in the heart of Occitanie: Corrèsa. Since then, they have returned several times, because they both love excursions with profound repercussions and, conversely, detest trips designed for thrills. Now retired, they have tried to live, because they feel "withdrawal is the only way out." However, the project will not quite come to fruition.

The definition of painting offered by Maurice Dennis, artist and art critic, a practitioner and theorist of the Nabis's colorful symbolism in the effervescent France of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is quite famous: "Painting, before being a horse, a female nude, or any other motif, is essentially a flat surface with colors." The poems of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Worcester, 1911–Boston, 1979) have made me think of Dennis's definition. They are words upon words, verses upon verses, unfolding across the page with such a scrupulous blend of meticulousness and density that it is often difficult even to see or understand the poems' themes. We see the colors, not the horse or the female nude.

If we asked ChatGPT, with the vast amount of information it has about the writer Jordi Lara (Vic, 1968), to write us a story imitating his style, his imaginative soul, I highly doubt that it would give us a product as unique, and at the same time as complete, as this one. The Cat and the Stars It seems to mark a new turning point in the career of the author ofA machine for waking up birds at night (2008) and Mystic rabbit (2016). There is no celebration of memory like the one we found in the books cited, for example. Nor is there a reconstruction of a real person through their last days of life, as occurred in Six nights in August (2019) with Lluís Maria Xirinacs. Here it seems rather that the author wanted to make a vehement defense of fiction per seThe beginning might remind us of those desert-like, civilization-overwhelming settings found in some American authors like Cormac McCarthy. A tradition that also goes back to Faulkner.

It's hard to imagine a writer with a more Soviet biography and career than Txinguiz Aitmatov (Sheker, Kyrgyzstan, 1928–Nuremberg, Germany, 2008). The son of a Kyrgyz father and a Tatar mother, he grew up at a time when his country—subjugated to the Russian Empire since the late 19th century—was becoming just another cog in the colossal machine of the USSR. His father, accused of being a bourgeois nationalist, was executed during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Nevertheless, Aitmatov prospered: he studied literature in Moscow, worked at Pravda, was widely read and translated into dozens of languages, received the Lenin Prize (the communist Nobel Prize)... More Soviet.

The narrative proposal of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria, 1977) stands out for moving away from the clichés about what contemporary African literature should be and avoiding what has been called pornography of poverty, a label the author has always treated with irony. Chimamanda Ngozi's protagonists are strong, independent, and well-positioned women who assert their right to be women in a chaotic world. And they have hopes, dreams, memories, and contradictions. This is the case with the four protagonists of her latest novel, The dream counter, a volume of almost 600 pages written over a decade—during which she has worked on memoirs, children's literature, feminist manifestos, and a public lecture on freedom of expression—and translated into Catalan by Anna Puente.

Watching your parents grow older, watching them gradually crumble and become vulnerable, crushed by the weight of an ever-increasing boulder of ailments and illnesses, must be one of the most brutal experiences a person can undergo during the second half of their life: because it confirms the fragility of everything, because you see them suffer and feel the same way, bringing you closer to an ever-closer vulnerability and disappearance. This is true, of course, only in families where the parents have fulfilled their duty as parents and where the children act as children. This is the case of Herman Roth, a Jewish man from Newark, the son of immigrants, a widower, a retired insurance salesman, and his son, Philip, a writer.

I discovered Joan Pons almost 35 years ago, with his narrative debut: the meeting of stories Don't believe what they say about me(Columna, 1991). I found it to be a more than promising literary baptism of fire. Since then, I've continued to follow him and have often commented on his work in the media: The Giraffe Maze(Proa, 1999), Single men(Proa, 2001), The Ice House(Bromera, 2009) or Heart disease(Univers, 2022) are some of his most outstanding books, vigorous novels. Pons excels in what could be called moral adventure novelHis stories always appeal to readers, but the underlying theme tends to probe, if not even accuse, us. As if he were the nephew of Baltasar Porcel or Jesús Moncada. He has experience, things to say. That's why I've never been able to explain why he enjoys so little attention. Why he is, in the country's literary scene, an almost invisible author. In 2016, he debuted as a poet with a commendable book: The Island of the Defeated Trees (AdiA). His titles are scattered across many publishing houses, too many. How is it that no publisher has seriously invested in him?

The title of the new novel by Toni Sala (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1969) is Scenarios, but it's the characters, and especially their voices, that carry the entire weight of the work, which is more reflective, speculative, and psychological than properly narrative. I mean that what the characters say, think, and explain is more important than the events that occur and are told with them. Conceived and structured as an exploration of what happens when people who have nothing in common meet by chance and interact, Scenarios It unfolds as a mosaic of psychologies and at the same time as a portrait of an era and a country: the depressed, debased, and sordidly erratic Catalonia of the post-pandemic and post-process. A phrase spoken by one of the protagonists, a famous actor ashamed of his success in audiovisual media and now in the process of reinventing himself as a theatrical stand-up comedian, defines the prevailing mood and general atmosphere of the novel: "I don't think you can pass it off with dignity."

William Faulkner (Mississippi, USA, 1897-1962), one of the four or five most influential novelists of the 20th century, perhaps only comparable to Proust, Joyce and Kafka, enjoys a well-deserved fame as a muscular and magmatic prose writer, as a creator of structures in which the living and the dead coexist, and as a builder of primal and brutal characters who, in turn, are of a Shakespearean complexity and depth.

The cover of the book Indiscreet Viewpoint. Anecdotes, humor, and gossip from the brief history of Catalonia in the 1930s., edited by Carlos Singla and published by Eumo, is from Feliu Elias, theDad. And it's an eloquent and satirical caricature that shows the kind of sympathetic humor contained in some of these texts, which are, in fact, images of a mythical era, that of Catalonia in the 1930s. An era that goes from the end of Primo de Rivera's dictatorship to the outbreak of the Civil War, passing through the upheaval of the Civil Republic, passing through the upheaval of the Republic. Without a doubt, these short texts contain the spirit of the times, with its dreams of freedom, democracy, and progress, but captured tendentiously by an ironic and festive gaze that delighted the indiscreet. Some of the protagonists, certainly, are well portrayed.

Let me start by saying that the Cal Carré publishing house is grateful for its willingness to revive the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), a fighter for women's rights, a literary genius of the highest level and mother of Mary Shelley, whom she endowed with similar talent. Two years ago, it published her novel Maria or the world against women, where she denounced the oppression that women experienced, embodied in one who dared to flee from her husband and was locked up with a lock and key. Now she has translated Mary. A fiction, where another woman runs away, but there is no one to stop her because she is strong in rebellion.

There are servile and cowardly journalists who sacrifice ethical rigor to obey their superiors or the dictates of the party in power that pays or feeds them (and tells them what to say) and there are journalists who try to do their job with honesty and rigor, who try to think and write skiing. And then there are journalists who are authentic heroes, who must work in ominously hostile contexts in which freedom of the press is threatened and vandalized daily, journalists who risk their lives if they dare to tell the truth or confront the abuses of the powerful (political leaders, mafias, businessmen) and explain reality.

The figure and biographical adventure of Joan Comorera embodies many of the greatness and misery of the first half of the 20th century: the brave and loyal political commitment, but also the obfuscated fanaticism of someone who conceives politics as a totalizing and dogmatic form of religion. Starting from Comorera, founder of the PSUC, a Catalan socialist and nationalist, a supporter of a Catalan communism not subaltern to the Spanish one and which would appeal to the proletariat and also to the incipient middle classes of the country, the history is better understood – the ideals and the hope and the heroic resistances, the betrayals and the betrayals and the sinister and incipient betrayals of the 20th century, so rich in monsters.

Of every author we like, we always love one book above all the others. My favorite book ofImma Monzon is A man of his word, where she recounts the death of her life partner with an excellence that many other books would like to have. And what does Monsó have to do with Teresa Ibars (Aitona, 1962), apart from being contemporaries and both from Lleida? Well, Ibars has just published a book that talks about the death of her partner, Xavier, as well as other goodbyes that have driven her crazy over the years.

Ferran Torrent (Sedaví, 1951), had he been born in the United States of Truman or Eisenhower and not in the Valencian Country crushed by the reactionary Castilianist boot of Francoism, could have had, like so many American writers of his generation, a double or triple literary career, with the film holding important positions in the field of journalism. The fact of being part of a linguistic-cultural system that is colonially minorised and interfered with – without an audiovisual industry worthy of the name and with precarious journalism – has meant that Torrent has had to dedicate himself almost exclusively to writing novels. Which is good, but it is also a shame. Because reading him it is clear that he has all the virtues of a certain American cinema of classical production and powerfully efficient results: plots that are wrapped but plausible, charismatic characters – even the most despicable ones –, strong and fast dialogues, and also a sense of existential adventure, a sense of spectacle and a sense of spectacle.