"Literary genres don't exist. For me, either there is literature or there isn't. We know what painting, architecture, sculpture, and music are—things change after John Cage—but it's not the same with literature. What is literature, and where do we find it? I can recognize it immediately: literature. I find it very evocative: literature. It excites me." Antoni Marí I used these words in 2012 to introduce Book of Absences (Tusquets), a magnificent example of the cultivated, demanding, and dazzling literary endeavor of the author born in Ibiza in 1944, who died in Barcelona at the age of 81. Shortly afterward, he added: "Literature is about fixing and dispelling the darkness."

A personal matter It is a short novel that offers the reader an intense picture of what the partisan resistance was like for Beppe Fenoglio (Alba, 1922 – Turin, 1963): a time of hypocrisy and contradictions, but also of genuine humanity. Drawing on his own experience as a partisan, Fenoglio also updates the narrative of the civil war in the Langhe region of Piedmont, an important theme in the literature of other Italians such as Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino.

What Maisie knew (1897) is a cult novel by Henry James (New York, 1843-London, 1916) which analyzes a corrupt, immoral, and hypocritical Victorian English society through the lens of the protagonist's parents: the selfish Ida and the vain Beale. They are the negligent parents of little Maisie, who will have to suffer the bitter divorce and the dire consequences of this traumatic separation.

Fear in capital letters is the fear that something bad will never happen to your child. Dani Alba (Sant Pere de Ribes, 1973) approaches this abyss with the novel Dandelion (LaBreu), a fiction based on reality: the 399 days of wake and anguish for her son Jan—Jana in the fiction—at the Vall d'Hebron. The novel moves swiftly and vibrantly—without sentimentality or morbidity—toward the new world that appears when life forces you to take a break.

"A nothing / we were, we are, we will be / still, in flower: / that of nothing, the / Rose of Nobody." These verses from the third stanza of the poem Psalm contain the title of what is one of the capital books of Paul Celan, Die Niemandsrose (1963). The Catalan version of Nobody's Rose, Now published in a bilingual edition, with a translation and commentary edited by Arnau Pons, by LaBreu Edicions, it allows us to read and get to know in depth one of the essential books of German and universal poetry of the 20th century.

In Take up your cross, new collection of poems byAntonia Vicens (Santanyí, 1941), "echoes of a bloody battle are felt everywhere," tanks advance with solitary executioners inside, and birds of prey "tear out the eyes of combatants" to make their nests. The omnipresence of struggle, blood, and war coexists with the human spirit of survival and the vindication of words like "redemption" and "memory." Once again, the Mallorcan author manages to move the reader with a compact and dense collection of verses published by LaBreu, as well as All the horses (2017) and Father, what do we do with the dead mother? (2020).

More than a hundred years have passed since the publication of this little wonder called Chéri (1920) and, as if it were a watch built by Switzerland's most competent professional, there's nothing that doesn't work: the provocation, the sensuality, the irony, the mordacity, the intelligence, the social criticism, and the psychological depth that the great Colette (1873-1954) was capable of. The book holds up not only because the story of love and passion between a woman approaching fifty and the son of one of her friends, who is not even twenty-five, is still unconventional. It holds up, above all, because of the French writer's abilities: the natural perfection of the dialogues, the subtlety of each gesture of the characters, the acute sense of reality demonstrated by each of the observations made by the narrative voice, and the progression of events, which is studied to the millimeter and leaves out of the frame crucial moments of the, or more than just the, lovers' unbridled love.

In addition to being a poet and literary critic, Joan Todó is a vigorous narrator, author of a narrative that elaborates very interesting and unconventional pseudo-novelistic forms as The first horizon (L'Avenç, 2013) or The green one is taken (Godall, 2021), which has also been dedicated to the form of the short story.In pockets (LaBreu, 2011) and Thieves (LaBreu, 2016), without forgetting "The Navel of the World", a story included inIn search of flamenco, a volume co-written with Jaume C. Pons Alorda and Sebastià Portell, whose geographical focus was the Ebro Delta, one of Todó's literary territories. He was originally from the interior (Sénia) but also a keen connoisseur of rice-growing landscapes. It is precisely a story that takes place directly, with a migrant disembarking from a small boat on a fine sandy beach, that opens the book. The sweetness of living, which is a collection that seems very consciously ordered, so that each piece is exactly where it belongs.

The DIEC says that the mascarell is a "sea bird of the sulid family, about 90 centimeters long, with white plumage and a black spot around its eyes" that has the peculiarity of diving into the sea like crazy. In the Catalan-Valencià-Balear Dictionary Another meaning of the word is added: "Masked, stained with mask." This is also the title of the Catalan translation of the thriller psychological work written by the Quebec author, playwright and poet Anne Hébert (1916-2000), a work that in 1983 won the Femina Prize and the Governor of Central Canada Award, among others, and which, in French, is titled The fous of Bassan.

The poem—because it is a single poem in four cantos: unitary, narrative, of philosophical ambition—begins with the memory of an old family clock, tall and bulky, which for many years had been repudiated by everyone because of the noise of its mechanism: "And I fear that it reminds you of when you are a tree." In the second canto, the poet—or, strictly speaking, the "I" of the poem—evokes that on such a day as the one described, February 28, 2024, his mother would have turned 107. And these two elements—the old baluerno of the clock and the birth of the mother—promote a serious and sustained reflection on the mystery of time and memory. We must add the constant, tutelary presence—which we already find in the wink of the title—of the Four quartets of T.S. Eliot, a work that also meditates deeply on our dying nature and the irredeemable condition of time.