Intruder in the dust It is not usually included among the handful of masterpieces of William Faulkner (1897-1962) However, upon closer inspection, it is an excellent novel with great literary strength. We could even consider it a very suitable title for readers who want to delve into the author's universe for the first time. It is also one of his works with the most evident anti-racist commitment. This is a noteworthy fact, especially considering that it was published in 1948, several decades before the civil rights movement took center stage in the United States.

The guardians of the houseShirley Ann Grau's (New Orleans, 1929–Kenner, 2020) novel operates with the discretion of something that knows it is explosive. Grau doesn't shout: she manages silence, restraint, and a sidelong glance because she trusts that the reader will understand that the true drama is not the conflict itself, but its normalization. And therein lies its literary power: the novel doesn't denounce, it exposes; it doesn't judge, it reveals.

Howard Fast (1914-2003) wrote Spartacus in 1951 from prison. He was serving a sentence for refusing to reveal information about his comrades in the Anti-Fascist Refugee Aid Committee during the Civil War. Thanks to the publisher L'Agulla Daurada and translator Lola Fígols, we can now read the novel in Catalan for the first time. A book that, despite its 450 pages, resonates with us thanks to (or because of) the film adaptation made by Stanley Kubrick in 1960, which we've been reading every week.

William Faulkner (Mississippi, USA, 1897-1962), one of the four or five most influential novelists of the 20th century, perhaps only comparable to Proust, Joyce and Kafka, enjoys a well-deserved fame as a muscular and magmatic prose writer, as a creator of structures in which the living and the dead coexist, and as a builder of primal and brutal characters who, in turn, are of a Shakespearean complexity and depth.

The life of Sam Greenlee (Chicago, 1930-2014), the author ofOur CIA infiltrator, brings to mind a James Bond film written and directed by Spike Lee. A descendant of the Deep South, with all the terrible and tragic heritage—slavery—that this entails, Greenlee was a diligent and meritorious student and made his way in the United States, structurally deformed by white segregationist racism. As a teenager and young adult, he participated in organizations promoting black civil rights, studied at several universities (political science), and finally joined the army, where he served for two years. From there, he moved to the U.S. Information Agency (diplomacy, propaganda, espionage) and became one of the first black agents deployed abroad. He served in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece. Having already left the service, in 1969 he gained considerable literary notoriety with Our CIA infiltrator, which makes one think of the novel Catch-22 by Josep Heller but as if it had been rewritten by Malcolm X and Richard Pryor.