Ghost Stories, by Siri Hustvedt (Northfield, 1955), is not just a book about loss: it is also a work written from the room that absence leaves when a shared life is broken forever, a book capable of making grief a habitable place. The love letter that is Ghost Stories reflects on the disappearance of love with the clarity of one who knows that pain cannot be tamed with grand gestures, but rather settles into the tiny crevices of everyday life: in an empty chair, in an interrupted sentence, in the unexpected weight of an object that once meant nothing and that, suddenly, becomes a relic. The title is of excellent precision: the ghosts that haunt these pages are not literary specters in the classic sense, but persistent presences of memory, reverberations of an intimacy that resists disappearing. The love for her husband, the writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), is not a memory embellished by art, but a living matter that continues to breathe within loss. The great virtue of the book is its ability to turn intimacy into a universal experience without losing a shred of uniqueness. Hustvedt writes from the wound, but she does so with emotional intelligence, thus avoiding the temptation of grandiloquence or gratuitous melodrama: "I feel Paul's voice". The author's prose, precise and profound, advances with serenity, and analyzes in detail the mechanisms of memory, the traps of recollection, the way the past bursts into the present with devastating force. Every page seems written with the awareness that remembering is, at the same time, an act of love and a condemnation. The presence of Paul Auster's unpublished writings adds a moving dimension, because they do not function as a mere editorial hook or a sentimental appendix, but as an organic extension of the narrative. The voice of the author of Leviathan emerges as a form of continuity that crosses the text and turns it into a posthumous dialogue, into an interrupted conversation resumed by literature. There is a very deep emotion in this inclusion: the feeling that writing is the last place where two lives can continue to find each other. It is also remarkable how Hustvedt reflects on identity when the loving bond disappears. Who are we when the other, who had helped us define ourselves, is no longer there? What remains of the self after annihilation? These questions run through the book like an underground current and give it a philosophical density that goes far beyond personal chronicle. Grief is not just the loss of a loved one; it is also the loss of a version of oneself, of shared time, of an intimate language built in two voices.A stunning, elegant, and profoundly human book

Ghost Stories is a work of painful beauty, the kind that doesn't just explain an experience, but makes it resonate within the reader. Hustvedt demonstrates that great literature is capable of entering the most vulnerable areas of existence without simplifying them. The author writes a book about grief, yes, but above all she gives us a book about the persistence of love, about memory as a form of resistance, and about the word as a space where the dead continue to speak with us. Striking, elegant, and profoundly human, it leaves a mark that is difficult to erase.Beyond the strictly autobiographical dimension, Ghost Stories also reads as a profound meditation on the very nature of literature. Hustvedt seems to ask what writing can do in the face of the irreparable. Literature does not console in an easy sense, it does not heal or restore what has been lost, but it does offer a verbal architecture where pain can take shape. Writing is a way of not letting oneself be swallowed by the void. Each sentence seems to be sustained by this tension between silence and the need to speak, between the abyss of loss and the urgency of giving it a grammar. Hustvedt has written a marvelous book that is at once an elegy, an emotional essay, and a piece of memory, with a narrative maturity worthy of the great voices who know that the word is the only possible form of survival.

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In a slightly more just world, the jury of the award to which Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 1960) submitted El pit adormit at the end of 2024 would have proclaimed her book as the winner. It didn't happen that way, but the work has finally seen the light of day: in almost 500 pages of impressive intensity and ambition, the poet –author of some twenty volumes, including Haikús del camioner (Empúries, 1999) and El guant de plàstic rosa (Edicions 62, 2016)– combines various narrative threads, such as the detection and evolution of the cancer that was diagnosed five years ago, the chronicle of how Catalan poetry was reborn in the late nineties thanks to an alternative circuit of readings, reflections on misogyny – that of the past and that of the present – and fragments in which family memories intertwine with a passion for reading and writing.

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John Irving (New Hampshire, 1942) has been a writer much loved by Catalan readers for decades. Although he has just turned 84, he has no intention of retiring: Reina Esther (Edicions 62/Tusquets; Catalan translation by Ernest Riera) has just arrived in bookstores, a novel that revisits one of the most emblematic settings of his fiction, the St. Cloud's orphanage where The Cider House Rules (1985) took place. It is there, at the beginning of the 20th century, that a surly girl of Jewish origin, Esther Nacht, arrives. Readers will accompany her on her long life journey, which begins in Vienna, continues in the American state of Maine and, after passing through Europe again, ends in Israel in the early eighties.

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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.

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Trump "never reads." Not books, not newspapers: "Not even the one-page or half-page notes they send him to prepare him for an interview." He is a complete functional illiterate. He only functions orally. He is a man of action without reflection, audacious, disruptive. Something that, in a chaotic world, far from penalizing him, has made him a political genius. If in 1992 James Carvill, Bill Clinton's advisor, made the phrase "It's the economy, stupid!" famous, now we could paraphrase it like this: "It's stupidity, stupid!" Out with experts, out with wise men, out with history, out with knowledge... Yes to imperative action that provokes stupefaction, fear, insecurity. Yes to the excitation of prejudices and base instincts.

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The new book by Ramon Boixeda (Sant Julià de Vilatorta, 1981) is not religious or mystical poetry, but it moves within the coordinates established by the GenesisBetween the apple of original sin and the dust – "Dust you were and to dust you shall return" – of the expulsion from Paradise. In this sense, Boixeda writes about birth, death, and life – strenuous, precious, perplexing, incomprehensible – that lies in between. PulseThe Sant Cugat poetry prize in memory of Gabriel Ferrater brings to mind a phrase by Saul Bellow that says: "Existence is work."

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A journalist from New York Times He sets foot in Barcelona. It's 1975. In the article he publishes in the American newspaper, he describes a city under construction where there was a fundamental problem: a lack of hotels. And above all, a lack of quality hotels. In 2024, the same publication writes about Barcelona, but it does so through an image: that of Barcelonans firing water pistols at a group of tourists. What happened between those two events? That's what the philologist and writer tries to find out. Jordi Amat in his last essay, The Battles of Barcelona: Imaginaries of a City in Dispute (Edicions 62), a portrait of the last 50 years of the city through its cultural touchstones. From the Olympic flame to water pistols, from Pedro Almodóvar to Woody Allen and Manolo Vital at Casa Orsola, Amat tries to discover at what point the city ceased to belong to the people of Barcelona, and to what extent a city can remain democratic when its citizens can no longer choose to live there.

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Since won the Booker Prize thanks to Orbital, Samantha Harvey's (Kent, 1975) diary has been filling up, and for now it is almost a feat to get to speak to her. Even so, the English author lives far from the media pressure, and not even the literary award, one of the most prestigious today, has managed to get her to buy a mobile phone. She speaks to us from the 16th century house where she lives, on the outskirts of Bath. It was there that she wrote her latest novel, in which she recounts a single day in the life of six astronauts on the International Space Station. While they orbit the Earth, the characters in the novel areOrbital (Edicions 62 / Anagrama; Catalan translation by Ernest Riera) concentrate on their jobs – such as cultivating protein crystals, monitoring microbes or investigating muscle decline –, they remember why they wanted to travel to outer space and, above all, they gaze in wonder at the unique and fragile planet.

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The title is the threshold of a book. And there are thresholds that seem to invite us to enter the work that they head and others that, on the contrary, rather dissuade us. As for the title of Maria Josep Escrivà's new book, I immediately felt that it was inviting me to get to know her verses. Because of the apparent contradiction that this phrase hides: can there be joy in oblivion? Perhaps yes: that of the lover who, finally, feels how the image of the beloved that has so mortified him is disintegrating. Or —and she wrote sophisticated lyrical material— that derived from the unconsciousness of someone who suffers from an illness that darkens his memory.

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Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, is the story of six astronauts who orbit aboard the International Space Station on a routine mission. They soon begin to ask themselves metaphysical questions about the inhabitants of the blue planet. Between science fiction and philosophical fiction, Harvey creates a literary sketch in which she demonstrates an exceptional command of a language that soon transforms into tiring poetic prose. It is true that, faced with a subject as human as life—one's own, that of others and that of everyone—perhaps the focus should have been more direct, closer, and not so based on the literary brilliance of the author. It is the same old debate: the aesthetics of words or the connection with the reader? Expression or communication?

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