There are no infallible formulas, but it could be said that a good short story is one that, by showing us only a piece of the lives of its characters, is capable of telling us about their entire lives and personalities. This is true, at least, for short stories of realistic conception, tone, and perspective, let's say of the Flaubertian and Chekhovian tradition, a tradition that 20th-century American short story writers (Hemingway, O’Connor, Cheever, Updike, Carver, Munro, and an endless etcetera) developed and explored in a way as brilliant as it was influential. Eider Rodríguez (Errenteria, 1977) fits within this tradition.The six medium-length stories that make up his new book, Everything was the same hole, translated with the usual skill by Pau Joan Hernàndez, all share the same narrative mechanisms and address very similar human materials. With a clear prose, of contained intensity and with a devastating expressive precision – more sober and wise than showy and exuberant –, always within the coordinates of the everyday, with narrators in the first or third person, Rodríguez focuses his attention on brief sections – an evening, a few days, a few weeks, a little over a year – of his protagonists' biographies. They are biographical sections in which everything is about to change or go off the rails, moments in which the uncertain possibility or the exciting hope of another life is glimpsed.Rodríguez shows us her protagonists by touching upon the touchstone of a husband, a lover, a friend, a lifelong (lesbian) partner, neighbors, a group of strangers, or her own family, and is capable of explaining these relationships in a rich, suggestive, subtle, complex way. They are relationships crossed by changing moods, agitated by long-sedimented contradictory feelings, overwhelmed by incompatible emotions that nevertheless must be reconciled.Unbalance the reader's expectations

Perhaps the story that best defines Rodríguez's literary proposal is Canícula, which opens the book. The protagonist, Ixabel, is a woman in her fifties, existentially tired and bored, married to a husband with whom they talk more about his dental problems than about anything more or less pleasant, adventurous or loving. One day Ixabel goes to a nudist beach, meets a slightly younger man there, gets excited, and falls in love with him. From here, Rodríguez could build a melodramatic, passionate story, full of debasing secrets, the typical revival of adolescence in adulthood, but he does the opposite and builds a mature marital love story, in which adultery is nothing more than a fleeting and ultimately unimportant circumstance.The ability to break or at least significantly unbalance or relocate the reader's expectations is the house's trademark. Rodríguez is very good at concluding her stories with small, disconcerting but meaningful details: the girl who has said goodbye to her best friend and gets into her father's bed and hugs him with a beautiful and purest love (in "Mars and ruins"), the nocturnal caress that betrays a very deep crack in a supposed marital paradise (in "Duck Heart"), the small terminal push that casts a shadow of doubt over a lifelong love affair (in "The Crater"). Another of Eider Rodríguez's virtues is her skill in creating secondary characters with little narrative presence but great substance. Rodríguez knows the mechanisms of the short story genre as well as the mechanisms of the human heart.

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The writer Eider Rodríguez (Errenteria, 1977) burst onto the Catalan bookstores scene in 2019 with A heart too big (Periscope / Random House), a collection of short stories that served as the gateway, for many readers in our country, to one of the most important contemporary literary voices in the Basque Country. Seven years later and an autofictional novel in between— Building materials (Periscope / Random House, 2023)—, Rodríguez returns to short stories with It was all the same hole (Periscope / Random House), six seemingly everyday stories that gradually move toward increasingly uncomfortable situations, reflecting the collective unease of the present. All three books have been translated from Basque into Catalan by Pau Joan Hernàndez.

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The brain of Jeanette Winterson (Manchester, 1959) is so privileged that he is able to connect the stories of Arabian Nights with the dangers of artificial intelligence, the importance of libraries, and a still-valid lesson from psychoanalysis. "Without imagination there is no future," he argues from one of the rooms at the Open University of Catalonia, shortly before receiving his doctorate. honorary cause Throughout her career—everything we have built and all the solutions to overcome obstacles have come from the imagination. The most important thing we can offer young people is the superpower of imagination.” We must “protect, honor, and respect it,” just as Aladdin does with the magic lamp he finds inside a cave, which is the starting point of the author’s new book.Written on the body (1994) and Why be happy when you could be something normal? (2011).

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More and more publishers, thankfully, are not limiting themselves to publishing a literary work, but are also offering us, within the same volume, a gift in the form of a prologue, epilogue, or translator's or editor's note. These extra texts help us get to know the author, provide context, or elaborate on a specific aspect of the edition or translation, making it even more interesting. It's a bonus, a detail for readers, that is greatly appreciated.

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I infiltrate a meeting for booksellers, convened by Edicions del Periscopi to present their new releases for Sant Jordi's Day. As if we didn't already have enough of a sense of the booksellers' work, it turns out they're meeting on a random afternoon in a central Barcelona hotel to discuss plots, influences, and their best bets. Since this publishing house has won eight Llibreter Awards and two Òmnium Awards in its thirteen years of existence, I suspect these meetings might be their secret weapon. It also gives me the opportunity to do some laundry and find out one of the Sant Jordi headlines: the bookstalls won't be able to go down La Rambla due to construction, and will be moved along Portal del Àngel to the Cathedral. So, we'll be able to walk the two and a half kilometers from Gràcia to Plaça Nova, browsing books and dodging people.

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Claire Lynch's (Dartford, England, 1981) debut novel is one of those books destined to find its way through word of mouth. In fact, A family matter It is not even a year old and already has half a dozen translations (in Catalan it is published by Edicions del Periscopi, translated by Núria Saurina, and in Spanish by Literatura Random House). A family matter It's as delightful to read as it is infuriating. It deals with great literary conflicts—love, loyalty, freedom, family secrets—but embedded within ordinary lives, with the trivial and harmless familiarity of very human and imperfect characters, and with a deceptive literary simplicity that poses moral dilemmas to the reader.

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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.

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Although she was born in a small town in southwestern Germany after the Berlin Wall had already fallen, Charlotte Gneuss (Ludwigsburg, 1992) grew up listening to the stories her parents told her about their youth in Dresden during the GDR years. "Since they had been able to escape so early, they had no problem talking about it," she recalls. She made the reverse move: when she turned 18, she moved to Dresden to study social work, and from there she went to Leipzig, where she trained in creative writing. "Thanks to my grandmother, I became an avid reader from a young age. Perhaps it was inevitable that one day I would try to write," she says. The root of GitterseeHer first novel—now published in Catalan by Periscopio, translated by Carlota Gurt, and in Spanish by Acantilado, translated by Alberto Gordo—consists of three sentences that came to the author in quick succession, prompting her to expand the story over seven years. "Thorsten and David."

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Strong gusts of wind shake the trees visible through the window of Richard Flanagan's office. The Australian writer reports to the ARA from Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, where he was born in 1961, grew up, and still lives. Tasmania is the backdrop for his latest book, Question 7 (Periscopio / Asteroide; Catalan translation by Míriam Cano), a skillful blend of memoir, historical and literary essay, and travel book. Starting with a visit by the author to the Japanese labor camp where his father was imprisoned during World War II, Flanagan not only reconstructs his life but also recalls the literary origins of the atomic bomb—it was first imagined by the visionary H.G. Wells—and denounces the colonial past that ended island nature, leading to a present in which there is perhaps no turning back.

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The birthday, by Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975), is a story somewhere between a novel and autofiction that deals with the liberation of a man who dismantles the totalitarianism of the most important institution: the family. And it is even more commendable that the author is Italian and has the courage to break the taboo of the family, a concept that is nothing more than a hypocritical social convention like all formalities.

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Readers are likely familiar with the work of Argentine writer Hernán Díaz thanks to Fortune (Periscope), the book that earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023 and was a huge global success. It portrayed the capitalist system from the heart of darkness, the New York Stock Exchange, whose literary strategies impressed the literary world. The playwright and screenwriter of As if it were yesterday Carles Mallol opens another door to this universe and especially recommends the author's previous novel, On the horizon, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Prize in 2018 and was translated into a dozen languages (it arrived in Catalan in 2020, on Periscope): "I devoured it," he says.

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"Being an editor may not be the best job in the world, but it is the best job in the world for me." Aniol Rafel, the founder and creator of Periscopi, said this in this same newspaper in 2016. At that time, he had only been publishing under his own label for four years, but he had already established a connection with readers that has continued to grow. the stir caused by the acquisition of Periscope by Group 62 and, therefore, from Planeta: it's news that could have been merely "industry-related," but which I've seen commented on by many people who have no connection to it, beyond being loyal readers of the publisher (who, now that I think about it, God grants them that connection).

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Grupo 62 has acquired majority ownership of Ediciones del Periscopio. With this business transaction, the imprint led by Aniol Rafel and Marta Rubirola becomes part of the group. We'll be able to sell the books we were producing without any restrictions and also maintain the distribution we had. We'll work as we have until now, but with greater ease," explains Rafel.

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Three and a half years after Gloria de Castro (Caldes de Montbui, 1974) will debut with The moment before impact In Periscope, with which she won the Llibreter prize, the publicist who left her job to dedicate herself to writing returns with a second novel, The solemn templesThe book tells the story of Nina, a middle-aged woman who returns with her husband and son to the house where she grew up, located in a lonely place. The house reawakens the ghosts of the protagonist's youth and forces her to confront the multiple crises of her uncertain present.

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The ballad is a musical and lyrical genre native to American popular culture that tells stories of love and loss, murder and betrayal. Ballads are sung by ordinary people, have a choral nature, and combine seemingly placid life with the emergence of death and tragedy. Ballad of Holt, of Kent Haruf (1943-2014), we find all this. As a Odyssey Inverted, Jack Burdette, an old and popular neighbor, former high school football star ("we had learned to expect unusual things from him"), returns one day to the town he had fled years before after having perpetrated a collective betrayal. This hated Ulysses is recognized – he is beaten and imprisoned – when he returns to Holt, his Ithaca, where his Penelope still lives. Now, Jessie is the partner of the voice that narrates the story, Pat Arbuckle, owner of the local newspaper.

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It was during a trip to Mexico, while strolling through the Oaxaca market, that Benoît Coquil (Brittany, 1989) found a T-shirt that caught his eye. "It featured the face of an old woman with gray hair and a cigarette dangling from her lips, and underneath it read: María Sabina, priestess of magic mushrooms", he recalls. Coquil, a professor at the Jules Verne University of Picardy and a specialist in Argentine literature, had never heard the name of this Mazatec healer and shaman. "I asked a Mexican friend to tell me things," he continues, "and he told me that Sabina had ended up becoming an icon of the movement hippie and of the psychedelic counterculture thanks to the rituals she practiced with hallucinogenic mushrooms."

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Georgi Gospodinov (Iambolo, 1968) is Bulgaria's most widely read and award-winning contemporary writer. A novelist, poet, and playwright, he has been translated into thirty languages. The Gardener and Death –which comes a year after the Booker Prize forThe shelter of time– proposes an autobiographical story about a son who, day after day, sees his father (Dinyo Gospodinov: an ironic and vital man) fade away due to illness and die. He tells this through an interior monologue of high literary quality that bears the stamp of the author's fragmented narrative style. Anarchic and experimental, unpredictable and dreamlike, metaliterary and absurd, Gospodinov does not write a novel about death, nor about a canonical mourning, but about the pain of witnessing the end of a life. Starting from the personal anecdote—which makes it clear that when it happens through language, it ceases to belong to us and becomes part of the realm of fiction—the author also offers a chronicle of a generation, that of Bulgarian men born at the end of the Second World War.

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The Valley of Flowers, by Niviaq Korneliussen (Nanortalik, Greenland, 1990), is a powerful and raw story that stands as a cry of denunciation of the silence surrounding the numerous suicides that occur without restraint in Greenland. In this sense, ice becomes a symbol of the destructive power it has on the mental health of the inhabitants of the area.

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