This summer marks 90 years since the failed landing in Mallorca by a group of Republican troops, mostly Catalan, led by Captain Alberto Bayo. In the wake of the anniversary, new editions of two recommendable classics have appeared: El desembarcament de Bayo a Mallorca (Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat) by the late Father Josep Massot i Muntaner and Els grans cementiris sota la lluna by Georges Bernanos (Nova Editorial Moll, translation by Antoni-Lluc Ferrer). These necessary rediscoveries coincide with the appearance of an exceptional book: Una isla brutalizada (Documenta Balear).The uniqueness is at least triple. Firstly, to tackle the first research book dedicated to his native Mallorca, Joan Maria Thomàs (Palma, 1953) has immersed himself in the family archive, from which he has recovered documentation, photographs and, above all, an epistolary treasure. Thus, the 491 letters shared by his future parents during the first months of the war allow him to reconstruct its impact, both on the front and in the island's rearguard, the profound sociopolitical transformations, the terrible repressive consequences and the complexity hidden behind the Manichaeism of any civil conflict. Furthermore, the personal notes of the Catholic municipal judge and military volunteer Gerardo Maria (Palma, 1905-1985) and of the young woman from a good family and volunteer in passive defense Àngela (Palma, 1910-2016) enrich the narrative with custom, linguistic (the letters will always be in Mallorcan Catalan, except for some brief parenthesis) and localist notes.A cruel persecution

Furthermore, the emeritus professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili substantiates, in line with what previous bibliography has already pointed out, the decisive nature of the failed landing in strictly framing those in favor of the rebels and in cruelly persecuting the rest: whether they were the captured, harassed, and shot militiamen, whether we spoke of the thousands of islanders who suffered the different repressive gears, whether it was the author's uncle priest –the musicologist Joan Maria Thomàs Sabater– accused of Catalanism. “Because what was happening was not only the expansion of a great animosity against an enemy that continuously bombed the civilian population, but a massive preventive repressive policy, which detained and imprisoned thousands of Mallorcans who seemed to the military and public order authorities to be susceptible of forming part of the 'internal enemy', assassinating a part of them, although the first great wave of deaths would not arrive until the landing occurred”. According to the latest census, we would be talking about 1,993 victims with names and surnames, but only the remains of 329 have been located in 28 different places, and only 68 have been identified.And third and last, Thomàs constructs, with the mettle of good historians, a critical account that does not seek to exonerate but rather to understand and make understood the complexity inherent in those events. He does so, for example, by collecting the legal and Christian scruples of Gerardo Maria himself, who, despite voluntarily joining the rebels and sharing an eschatological interpretation of the conflict, distances himself from violent excesses and, faced with veiled threats for his lack of repressive enthusiasm, will leave for the Peninsula. This unease will never place him in public dissent with the dictatorship, but it surely explains that in 1953, as a judge, he carried out the exhumation of a victim murdered in Mallorca during the war by a prominent local falangist. And a civil war on an island is practically a war within the family.

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I imagined that bookstores after Sant Jordi would be an oasis of peace and literature, and I find them to be a whirlwind of boxes and delivery notes. "For us, Sant Jordi ends in June," Xevi Cortacans, owner of La Muntanya de Llibres in Vic, tells me, a name that has a literal meaning these days. Sendak bookstore also has a pile of boxes ready to return to distributors, with the invented books from the festival. "We return as many books as we sold for Sant Jordi," says Èric del Arco, partner of Documenta and president of the Booksellers' Guild. He opens the spreadsheets. "We sold 3,251 books during the week and returned 3,200. We had to buy 6,400 books to sell half of them." Of course, they didn't just dispatch new releases, but mainly sold books from their backlist, which he estimates to be 13,000 copies. Of the three thousand books sold, two thousand were different titles. Only of 22 titles did they sell more than ten copies, so 95% are titles that do not appear in the rankings.

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It was a surprise that Irene Rubio Martínez (Sallent, 1991) didn't submit her entry for the Documenta Prize. She hesitated until the very last minute, and a friend waited outside Documenta on September 19th to make sure she didn't back out. She was right to do so, because the jury decided to award her first novel. You will be the valleywhich presents a dystopian and devastated scenario with several female voices. "The literary ambition, a world of its own that is both dark and luminous, powerful narrative voices, and the imaginative, unsettling, and deeply believable construction of a world in which nature and city are violently confronted, make the winning work an original and vibrant proposal that looks directly at the present and speaks, among many other things, of patriarchy," says the jury made up of Albert Forns, Roser Cabré-Verdiell, Pau Vidal, Èric del Arco, and Eugenia Broggi.

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American author Kay Hymowitz wrote the essay Manning up In 2011, Hymowitz describes a new stage of life, pre-adulthood, a period between adolescence and adulthood, which she links to prolonged education, difficulty accessing credit, postponing family formation, and the digital leisure culture. Hymowitz describes how this new phenomenon has had a more negative impact on men, since women have a clearer biological clock, which warns us when it's time for pre-adulthood to end. It should not be forgotten that access to a well-paid job or owning a home have become undertakings worthy of Frodo Saquet and the Fellowship of the Ring. Hymowitz then argues that, without a clear life plan, many young men easily become trapped in a "man-creature" culture: they enjoy the privileges of adulthood (sex, consumption, freedom of movement) but avoid the obligations (own finances, family, caregiving).

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