John Berger (London, 1926-Antony, France, 2017) is one of those intellectuals of the 20th century who today seem impossible. Combative and erudite, a staunch Marxist with a highly refined artistic taste, politically militant and intellectually sophisticated, select and popular, Berger achieved, like a contemporary colleague of his who was also an art critic, Robert Hughes, a feat currently inconceivable: to surround himself with an aura of fame without selling out his rigor, squandering his prestige, or allowing his ideas to be adulterated or his priorities to be altered. Both Berger and Hughes achieved fame thanks to two cultural milestones of television, Ways of Seeing (1972) and The Shock of the New (1980), respectively, which brought the visual arts to the general public in a didactic but, at the same time, serious and expert way. What matters, in any case, is that, beyond the television glory, neither Berger nor Hughes ever stopped doing above all what for them were the main tasks: looking, thinking, writing. It is partly for this reason that everything they wrote still seems to us at least interesting.

The economist and essayist Tim Jackson (United Kingdom, 1957) calmly and meticulously explains the radical shift proposed by his latest book, The Case for a New Economy (Arcàdia, 2026, translated by Anna Llisterri). It deals, in the form of an initiatory journey – which includes personal anecdotes and philosophical, historical, and ecological lessons – with two ideas that clash with prevailing capitalism: the first, that human prosperity has more to do with health than wealth; the second, that the economy should above all be concerned with care, in all its forms, and not with incessant growth, as it currently is. Jackson, of whom Catalan readers had only previously been able to read Postgrowth (Arcàdia, 2022), opens the doors of his English study where he works to ARA to discuss the ideas that have preoccupied him over the last five years.

Up to now, and for almost thirty years, we have known Josep Pedrals (Barcelona, 1979) as a poet, a performer, a lecturer, and a cultural manager. With Poeticismes (Arcàdia, 2026), he debuts as an essayist with the same combination of pleasantness, erudition, and humor that abounds in his verses. In the catch-all drawer that is Pedrals' new book, we find reflections on emperors buried in honey or on the monument to Jacint Verdaguer on Passeig de Sant Joan, chronicles of some of the thousands of recitals in which he has participated around the world —like the one that took him to Macedonia accompanied by Adam Zagajewski—, vindications of authors less known to readers than they should be, and a wealth of curious technical speculations on poetry writing, one of his great passions, along with omnivorous reading and a love for the stage.

He Colmo Tóibín who in 1975, having just turned 20, arrived in Barcelona "which was emerging from the calamities of dictatorship and repression" could not imagine that, half a century later, he would be such a popular author in Catalonia, that he would be received with all the honors by the mayor of the city, Jaume Collboni, and that he would become He is one of the writers chosen to represent the Catalan capital at this fall's Guadalajara Book Fair..

It often happens that good ideas gain strength from unexpected coincidences and complicities. This was the case with Arcadia, which was born in 2003 thanks to the chemistry between two demanding, curious, and discerning editors and a bookseller. The editors were Montse Ingla (Barcelona, ​​1960) and Antoni Munné (Barcelona, ​​1954). The bookseller, Antonio Ramírez (Medellín, 1960), from La Central"We realized we shared very diverse interests and that we wanted to try our luck with a personal publishing project at the pace our jobs allowed," they explain. Munné had held management positions at Planeta and Santillana—overseeing labels such as Alfaguara, Taurus, and Aguilar—and Ingla was literary director of Cruïlla, which published around 100 new books annually specializing in children and young adult literature. Ramírez asked them to edit the first issue of a thought journal from La Central: "There were articles by Zygmunt Bauman, Roberto Calasso, Jordi Llovet, Natalia Ginzburg and Umberto Eco, among others."