There are novels with prose so heavy, with such a slow rhythm and such a short breath that the pages seem to wheeze with sedentary overweight. The prose of the novel Tota la vida buscant, by Kae Tempest (London, 1985), a very recognized name in the world of poetry, dramaturgy, and rhapsody, aims to be the complete opposite: agile, strong, cutting, tense, between electric lyricism, frontal narration, and raw realism. Sometimes Kae Tempest does not succeed in their purpose, and then they produce telegraphically anemic descriptions and repetitive passages, of a paralyzing prolixity. Other times they do achieve it, however, and then the novel vibrates with that authenticity that we usually attribute to things, people, and works not distorted by gratuitous sophistication or spurious intentions.The protagonist of the novel – I write it this way because the central character, Rothko, is non-binary, just like the author, and also because, beyond the opinion each reader may have about inclusive language, literature is always an exercise in personal creativity and expressiveness, and therefore Tempest is as legitimized as Joyce to do whatever she wants with the language– is thirty-six years old and has just returned to her town after spending fifteen years in prison. The panorama she finds there is just as desolate and depressing as when she had to leave: a junkie mother in total process of degradation; a failed and absent father; an affectionate but difficult sister... Furthermore, Rothko lives a double malaise, which has to do with her theoretically already overcome addictions and with her inability to feel fully as she is in her female body.The novel is divided into three parts, and unfolds like an omniscient panorama of which Rothko is the simultaneously afflicted and hopeful axis. In the first part, we witness Rothko's re-establishment of contact with his former world and his old life. Tempest describes very well Rothko's costly adaptation to freedom, his shame and helplessness in the face of a present that frightens him, and she also manages to paint in a very genuine and natural way the whole galaxy of wounded, damaged, poor, and often marginal supporting characters who swarm around his world. Where Tempest's talent shines brightest is in the synthetic narration of situations and the expressive exploration of personalities. In this regard, the pages about Rothko's parents, Ezra and Meg, why they are the way they are, what relationship they have maintained between them, are exceptional.Towards the redemptive culmination

The second part of the novel takes place twenty years earlier, and introduces us to Rothko as an adolescent, uncomfortable and out of place because she is a girl who wants to be a boy but dares not admit it. Although it also has emotional and strong passages, it is more conventional, like a typical coming-of-age novel: a decaying and unsupportive family environment, pleasure and vice, ambient homophobia, love and sex with a girl who understands her... In the third part, Tempest returns to the present and recovers the rhythm and plasticity of her best prose, and, with a melodramatic touch, offers a redemptive atonement and culmination, of possible reconstruction, for Rothko.The idea that art should have no function beyond being powerful and complex is very modern and perfectly legitimate and defensible, but it is also evident that it is an artistic conception that sometimes stems from the privilege of hegemony. I mean that Tempest, in her condition as a non-binary person who has already completed the complicated and painful process that the protagonist is considering undertaking, has also written this book to guide and explain. There are quite didactic dialogues, which are noticeably written to offer accompaniment and care to those who need it. One of the great things about good literature is that it makes familiar what is initially strange, and this Tota la vida buscant achieves it.

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There is a teenage memory in the life of Irene Rubio (Sallent, 1991) that remained etched in her mind. When she was 16 years old, one day her mother decided to teach her how to make macaroni. "She put me there, with the boiling pot in front of me, and told me: 'Now you have to put salt in the water.' When I asked her why, she replied: 'Because that's how it's been done all my life,'" explains the writer. Over time, she realized that this answer was repeated on other occasions, and this made her uneasy. From that strangeness, Rubio has made a novel: Seràs la vall (L'Altra Editorial), with which she has won the Documenta 2025 prize, it is a dystopia about a female community that has always lived constrained by ancestral customs.

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Claudia Durastanti was born in Brooklyn, emigrated to a small town in southern Italy at the age of six, then lived in London and returned to the United States. She now lives in Rome. With L'estrangera, she was a finalist for the Strega Prize and the Prix Fémina, won the Strega Off Prize and the PEN Award, and was featured among the best books of the year by The New Yorker magazine. Missitàlia (L'Altra Editorial / Anagrama; translated by Mercè Ubach) is a historical journey that goes from the south of Risorgimento Italy to an imagined future on the Moon. There is nothing conventional in this book, where the protagonists are women who live on the fringes, and which combines genres such as western, espionage, dystopia, or intrigue.

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The non-existent evil is a psychological and introspective work by the Italian writer Giulia Caminito (Rome, 1988). After winning the Campiello with an equally scathing and complex work, The lake water is never sweet (L’Altra, 2022), the author once again reveals herself as a keen but ruthless observer of society and the hidden and perverse mechanisms that silently permeate it. It is a slow infiltration, a discomfort that does not explode but festers. And it is here that the title becomes a trap: evil is not only present, but it manifests itself in its most contemporary form, the one we cannot name.

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Visual artist and writer Alicia Kopf (Imma Ávalos, Girona, 1982) returns to bookstores, ending a decade-long hiatus. After the success of Ice Brother, with which he obtained the Documenta Award and the Bookseller's Awardtranslated into ten languages, now publishes Echo's Memoryalso at La Otra Editorial. If you Ice Brother It stemmed from the artistic project Anticantharctic and he dealt with explorations in the North Pole to talk about his relationship with his autistic brother, in Echo's Memory part of the art project Speculative Intimacy (2019-2025) and deals with digitized consciousness to discuss desire and memory. The book, which is framed within autofiction, mixes elements of memoir, essay and novel.

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First published in 2007, The red parts It is the chronicle of the trial of a case reopened thirty-five years after it remained unsolved: the murder of the author's aunt, something that, without having directly affected her when it happened, because she had not even been born yet, had always hovered like a ghost over the family, who could not find peace knowing that the murder of March 1969 was still at large. But Maggie Nelson is an author who is both too powerful and too subtle. to write only A legal chronicle: the book delves into intimate details of her childhood and youth, marked by other losses, pain, and a growing sense of bewilderment, and also rises into theory by proposing a series of highly pertinent reflections on the reasons for the collective obsession with the violent deaths of women. These three paths—chronicle, autobiography, and essay—intersect here and there, seemingly without order, on every page of the book, organically, as only a highly skilled hand knows how to orchestrate. And indeed, the author ofThe Argonauts, the book that would catapult her to fame a few years later —or, at least, as one of the icons of a new way of writing autobiographical essays— she was already successfully demonstrating here how to move elegantly and radically from literary theory to a small white box containing the remains of her deceased father's bones. This audacity comes naturally to her, and she masters literary tools with ease. If, in addition, the translation is impetuous and playful, as is the case here, the text becomes as captivating as the original.

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In the last eleven years Toni Sala (Sant Feliu de Guíxols, 1969) has published three novels that are three ways of approaching life and death. Scenarios (The Other) culminates the trilogy that began with The boys (L'Otra, 2014) and continued with Persecution (La Otra, 2019). Together they also form a portrait of Catalonia in the midst of the independence process and post-independence process. The writer, one of the most solid and least complacent voices in Catalan literature, now tells the story of Tomàs Niubó, a popular actor who suffers a road accident near Puigcerdà. This event brings him closer to Vadó, a fat and lonely man who finds him, and Olga, a nurse who works at the hospital where the actor will end up. They are the vertices of an introspective and exuberant narrative triangle, through which Sala delves into the minds of three wounded and simultaneously disoriented characters, as much as the society they inhabit.

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The screams, a novel with which Víctor Recort (Sant Boi de Llobregat, 1990) has won the latest Documenta award -shared ex aequo with Irene Zurrón—, begins with a man getting into an elevator that is one of those "modernist gems that the City Council has classified as a heritage asset of the city." On the floor where the man, Eloi, is going, he is met by Milan, a veteran presenter of a trashy TV show he had collaborated on years ago, Coco, another fellow talk show host, and the corpse of a dead girl, "the tomato girl." The story progresses in two time periods: the countdown to get rid of that lifeless body and the memory of the last summer Eloi spent with his wife and two children.

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Doctor and writer, Ada Klein Fortuny (1975) is the pseudonym of the author of the essay The white plague(L'Otra, 2020), with which he entered the Catalan literary scene and in which he linked six writers and tuberculosis. Now he publishes his first novel, Lisa Cohen, a love story that relies on the epistolary narrative mechanism. We read a long letter to her lover—to whom she addresses herself as "my beloved lord"—written by Lisa, a woman who boards a train to Paris and reflects on ambition, inequalities, betrayals, desire, forgiveness, motherhood, prejudices, and the passage of time. At the same time, she takes stock of her lineage and the sisterhood that develops among friends. A letter that, evidently, she will never send.

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Perejaume's readers (Sant Pol de Mar, 1957) know that, in their poems, aphorisms and essays, literary creation and nature are intertwined, they feed off each other and even merge. To put it in words that can be found in The Written, his latest book, "the text is based on the slope of the land", there is "a humid breeze that always runs letters up" and you can "bind several valleys linked by the valley". "Ah, if only I knew how to write like any mountain writes!" exclaims the author in one of the segments of The open table, the initial section that opens the volume.

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In one of my childhood memories, I picture a friend and I frightened in the middle of a demonstration in defense of our town's natural aquifer. I also remember my friend's aunt looking at us all overwhelmed, not knowing how to get rid of us, huffing and puffing and saying: "You are at the age of turkey."The expression is not correct in Catalan (Optimot recommends saying "the age of the cake"), but that doesn't mean that we didn't find it very funny.

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