Rachel lives in Los Angeles, she is Jewish (but not religious) and has a serious problem with food. She cannot stand the idea of gaining weight and what she has experienced at home does not help her: her mother instilled in her the obsession with maintaining her figure, so Rachel's therapist recommends that she cut off all contact for a long period. On the other hand, Rachel meets a sales assistant in a yogurt shop (Yo!Good) and is fascinated by her. It's Miriam, who always insists on putting the maximum amount of yogurt and extras in her tub, when Rachel would prefer it flat and with counted calories. Miriam is also a woman of great anatomical splendor: she is fat, I mean, but that doesn't seem to bother her at all. The inevitable will happen: Rachel will fall in love with Miriam. The frozen yogurt chain is owned by her family, which is why she helps out by working as a sales assistant there. The family: orthodox Jews, who rigorously celebrate the Sabbath, and where it is unthinkable to willingly accept a lesbian relationship. Rachel is not exclusively lesbian: she has had male and female partners. But with Miriam she has found a sexual partner that allows her, at the same time, to let her guard down regarding food. Together they enjoy themselves equally in bed and at the table. Rachel starts to gain weight, but while she is with Miriam, this doesn't seem to worry her. Everything goes well until, at a dinner at Miriam's family's house, Rachel happens to make some political comments about the oppression suffered by Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. This opens a Pandora's box that will determine the entire latter part of the novel, which, naturally, I will not reveal. Ingenuity and pleasantness

To the reader who now wonders if they would enjoy reading a story with this theme, it should be explained that this is a text written with wit and charm and offers a de-dramatizing view of eating disorders. One of the text's great successes is relating food to sex. How can one, in effect, enjoy one without the other? “Love –writes the narrator– is when you have food in your mouth and you know it won't make you fat. Lust is when you have food in your mouth and you know it will make you fat”.But what happens when love and lust merge? A strange oasis, an unusual and absolute freedom: exactly what Rachel finds in Miriam. And the miracle happens: “Tasting her saltiness, I was struck by the sensation of eternity, as if it were all before us, lived by our ancestors in Russia, Lithuania, Poland, or Moldova. We were two Jewish women from the shtetl [Jewish village] reincarnated, two women who had met in a previous life and had loved each other. I had the sensation that everything that had happened before was happening now, at that moment, and that everything that was happening at that moment would happen forever. That love had always existed between women. It would continue to exist. We were spreading it. It radiated through the windows of my apartment, across the city, through the canyons, beyond the hills, into the night sky”.Being a collection of erotic literature, the sex scenes are good: “I went down to her breasts and rubbed my face against her blouse firmly, so she could feel me well. Her nipples hardened under the cotton fabric”... and I leave the rest to the imagination of the readers.As that old advertisement slogan said: “Life is not made for counting calories”. But Rachel hasn't discovered that until she fell in love. Let's call it sex, let's call it love: the abysmal debauchery that leads lovers to the great banquet of their own bodies.

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This is a somewhat surprising story, especially considering it was written by a woman. I don't know much about Amy Twigg: what the book flap says is all that can be found about her online: that she is English – and seems quite young (her age is not stated anywhere) – that she studied creative writing and that with Rotten Creatures she won the BPA Pitch Prize and caused quite a stir. It is a story that begins in a, let's say, inadvertently routine way. Iris (thirty-two years old) decides to enter a women's commune –the House of the Left— to see if her precarious life reality improves. She does so, attracted by one of the residents in the house, the mysterious Hazel. At the head of the domestic matriarchy is Blythe, a vigorous and decisive woman.The profile of those who were welcomed there can be imagined: “Not all of them were fleeing violence. There were women who came because they were exhausted from the eight-hour workday, from working to pay for a house where they barely lived and from promotions that never came. Women tired of frustrating dates and of heating meals in the microwave, of receiving unsolicited dick pics and of traffic jams. Of fiddling with their keys when they returned home and it was dark, of covering their drink with their hand so that nothing would be put in it, of not drinking a sip because the waiter had given them a bad vibe”.A safe space for women?

So far everything is in order. The House of the Left seems like one of those safe spaces for women, where they can exercise sorority with freedom and joy. But no. What will happen, and is announced in the text almost immediately, is unexpected. We could say that the novel begins like Terra d’elles and ends like The Lord of the Flies. Herland (Herland) is a science fiction utopia by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It deals with a society inhabited solely by women where order, peace, and rationality prevail. This gynaecotopia presents a cooperative collectivity in which competitive relationships have been transformed into relationships of solidarity. Somewhere in South America, three million Amazons live happily in cooperation and communion with nature. They reproduce by parthenogenesis and have managed to conceive only daughters. Their religion is maternal pantheism. A motherhood that is transversal to society, influencing all arts and industries, absolutely protecting all children and providing them with the most perfect care and education. Herland is the second volume of a trilogy and was originally published in 1915. It was translated by Jordi Vidal and published in Catalan in 2002.The Lord of the Flies, in turn,is a more well-known novel. It was published in 1954 by William Golding, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It deals with a group of young British boys stranded on a desert island who try to self-govern with chilling results. It is a fable about the innate drives of violence in the individual that made a fortune (the volume was translated by Manuel de Pedrolo and published in Catalan in 1966).Well then, everything that happens in the supposedly ideal space of the House of the Left will reveal the contradictions of human nature (male and female alike). The love story of Iris with Hazel (the left of the story) will evolve, but so will, for the worse, the relationships between the resident women and Blythe's own moods. The male intervention, however, does not help, but rather precipitates events.Do not reveal anything if I write that things will end badly, as the narrator repeatedly warns us. What seemed like a feminist parable ends up becoming her nemesis. But Amy Tigg's narrative flow flows so smoothly and so well-oiled that we fall into it without realizing it. And so passes the glory of the world (and of women).

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A hidden door behind one of the benches in the chapel of the baptistery of Girona Cathedral leads to a dimension suspended in time. It is the entrance to the bell tower of the largest medieval nave in the world. On the Gothic walls, the names of the bells can still be read, and the ropes hang from the ceiling to ring them. Climbing a beautiful and humble spiral staircase leads to one of the rooms that the Girona writer Prudenci Bertrana surely trod in the early 20th century. It is where the bell ringer lived until before the Civil War. Behind a large window overlooking the Plaça dels Apòstols hides a two-story dwelling with three cells, as if it were a stage. The same one where we can imagine the protagonist of Josafat living, the hunched bell ringer, with a pointed skull, eagle's nose and rough hair, who lives isolated, constrained between lust and the weight of sin to fall into the seduction of a prostitute.

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Read A match to the tongueThis collection of erotic poetry, edited by Nina Busquet and Anna Noguer, is a territory where desire is articulated not as metaphor, but as raw material. Every word is a risk in a world where censorship seems to be making a comeback. Eroticism appears stripped bare: it explodes and is contained, squeezed and refined, with that subtle tremor that precedes combustion.

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Ediciones de la Ela Geminada offers us a privilege like few others: reading texts by two excellent writers who, moreover, were written with the idea that they would never be made public. This fact, on the one hand, creates an unusual sincerity and, on the other, occasionally makes the reader feel a little uncomfortable, even if they can't stop reading.

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This Sant Jordi, in Girona's Plaça Catalunya, there will be a new book stall representing the new generation of Girona publishers. It is formed by Cap de Brot and Gata Maula, two young independent publishing houses founded this year with a similar purpose: to publish good books in Catalan and to do so and promote it from Girona. Nearby, heading towards La Rambla, Laia Regincós will be at the Ela Geminada stall. Despite being only thirty years old, she has been managing the business for six years. de facto This publishing house was founded in 2011, but this will be the first to do so as an owner. groupie She sat in the front row of the presentation of the two publishing houses. "For many years, I felt very alone," she says. Now, far from competing with each other, they are advocating for alliances and helping each other where necessary.

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This book is part of a long tradition of autobiographies by what are now called "sex workers." And it is being published now, just as the publication ofStory of my eight sins, by Lea Ferrer (pseudonym). Both volumes are among those offered on Amazon under the heading Real facts.

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