I cried so much reading Hamnet Maggie O'Farrell's film, I still remember that abyss: a hand reaching down my throat and placing a black hole in the pit of my stomach that throbbed as if it were about to burst. So before seeing director Chloé Zhao's recently released film adaptation eight Oscar nominationsThe expectation of a downpour was a ten out of ten on the stairs of my Plómetro (a reference to a popular Spanish TV show). And even more so, fueled by the marketing hype and my Instagram algorithm: lately I've been watching Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal more than my parents. In the queue at the Verdi Park cinemas, at the preview organized by the publishers L'Altra and Libros del Asteroide for industry guests and the press, I confirm that we're all armed with a pack of tissues because everyone here has read the book. Will this be a good thing or a bad thing? We'll find out when we leave.

"We had learned to accept our father's irrational despotism like his whiskers," says the narrator of one of the stories in Life is short, etc. (1984 Editions / Asteroide; Catalan translation by Mercè Ubach). The new book by Veronica Raimo (Rome, 1978) returns to the first person to explore lives that do not necessarily coincide with the author's own, but which often share her ironic, biting, and harsh point of view. Raimo achieved great success in Italy with the novel Nothing is true (1984, 2023 editions), which sold more than 100,000 copies and won awards such as the Viareggio and Strega Giovani. It explored the obsessions and dirty laundry of a Roman middle-class family he knew very well: his own.

The peculiar and subtle work of Rachel Cusk (Saskatoon, 1967) has been gaining readers in Catalonia thanks to the commendable commitment of the publishing house Les Hores, which has published four books in five years. In addition to two of its most compelling titles –A life's work (2001), a revealing and controversial look at motherhood, and Sequel (2012), a chronicle of the shipwreck of his marriage, has revealed the latest novels he has written, The other house (2021) and Parade (2024). "I haven't invented anything in my writing for a while now," says Cusk. "Life is a writer's primary material. The purest literature often comes from personal and intimate experiences."