The passage of time has not diminished the shyness of Jean Echenoz, but it has not managed to turn him into a cynical or disenchanted author. Born in Orange in 1947, the French writer has been one of the headliners of this year's Mot festival, but before that he passed through Barcelona with a new book in hand. Bristol (Raig Verd, 2026; translation by Anna Casassas) narrates decisive months in the life of Robert Bristol, a film director who is finishing the shoot of his latest film. It features effervescent, established, and semi-retired actresses, a solicitous but inconstant lover, an inspired policeman, a blackmailing general from South Africa, a bestselling author living in a palace, and a long list of supporting characters, human and animal, who further expand Echenoz's universe. The usual taste for details, the author's undeniable skill, and a sense of humor more subtle than our times make Bristol a pleasant and recommendable reading experience.

This novel is another stone – and there are many already, thanks to the efforts of the Raig Verd publishing house – to build the universe Ursula K. Le Guin in Catalan and to understand the scope of the work, so varied, of one of the most important authors of Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Lavinia It doesn't belong to any of the famous cycles; it goes its own way, like its protagonist. It's more of a historical novel than a fantasy, and at the same time, it's an exercise in rewriting history. The Aeneid of Virgil. If in the twelve-book epic the character of Aeneas's wife has not a single line of dialogue and is always in the shadow of the Trojan warrior, Le Guin wanted to put her at the center and gave her the voice she lacked in the classical world. Part of the book's merit lies in this gesture. Originally published in 2009, it belongs to the wave of works that challenge the flatness of patriarchal tradition and, in a creative way that doesn't negate but enriches it, assert that history cannot have been written or starred in solely by men. In the epilogue she wrote at the end of the novel, the author declares her unconditional love for Virgil and says that what she intended was only "a meditative interpretation suggested by a minor character in his story, the unfolding of a clue."

Certainly, the 20th century is not the century of Einstein or the atomic bomb; it is the century of women. Here in Catalonia, the 20th century was prolific in feminist demonstrations, which we need to understand in order to build an even more feminist 21st century. Provided, of course, that we don't want to perpetuate the mess that is the world today.

Unlike some of the undisputed classics of dystopian literature, for example Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell or Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, who in a more or less defined and precise way show what the monstrously controlling societies that they literary in their new novel are like and how they function. Gliff, the British Ali Smith (1962) only shows it to us in a vague, partial way, based on a few significant details, creating a global drawing that tends to be abstract. He does this intentionally, of course, and this, let's say, deliberate imprecision has a frankly disturbing suggestive power in the best passages of the work. Overall, it deprives it of its symbolic and representative capacity, deactivating its expressive force and lowering its emotional and dramatic temperature.

He's not yet 30, but Lola Olufemi (London, 1996) has been a leading author on feminism, racism, gender, and anti-capitalism for years. Her two books have been published in Catalan thanks to the publisher Raig Verd and the translator Josefina Caball. The first, Feminism interrupted (2023), aims to be a warning of the danger of feminism becoming a commodity and claims that it is "a weapon to fight injustice." The second, Experiments to imagine differently (2025), breaks down the traditional form of the essay to return meaning to words like future and revolution and for claiming "being able to be and live differently."

Suffering a serious car accident or being the victim of a terrorist attack can break your body and leave you with severe and lasting psychological wounds. Being attacked by a brown bone in the midst of the prodigious and immense nature of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, can also leave your body destroyed and can mark you with psychological wounds that are difficult to heal and do not easily erase. But there is something else here. The brutal encounter between the wild animal and the defenseless human being represents the dissolution of the boundary that separates the pure biology of the beast and the moral and ideological world of the person. It is the embrace—unnatural and extremely natural: wonder and monstrosity—of two worlds, the fusion between the atavistic past and the modern present. This is how anthropologist Nastassja Martin (Grenoble, France, 1986) explains it in her book Believe in wild animals.