John Irving (New Hampshire, 1942) has been a writer much loved by Catalan readers for decades. Although he has just turned 84, he has no intention of retiring: Reina Esther (Edicions 62/Tusquets; Catalan translation by Ernest Riera) has just arrived in bookstores, a novel that revisits one of the most emblematic settings of his fiction, the St. Cloud's orphanage where The Cider House Rules (1985) took place. It is there, at the beginning of the 20th century, that a surly girl of Jewish origin, Esther Nacht, arrives. Readers will accompany her on her long life journey, which begins in Vienna, continues in the American state of Maine and, after passing through Europe again, ends in Israel in the early eighties.

"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."

The title of the new book by Cristina Fernández Cubas (Arenys de Mar, 1945) summarizes one of the vocations of his literature: to show what remains hidden, the mystery that beats on the margins of official stories. What is not coming (Tusquets) includes half a dozen new stories by the Catalan writer, who has been distinguished over the last decade with the Critics' Prize (2015), the National Fiction Prize (2016) and the National Literature Prize (2023). "When they called me to notify me of this latest award, I thought they had made a mistake because I already had it, but I was the one who was wrong," she admits with a smile. Fernández Cubas is not very prolific, but she doesn't want this collection to be the last and already has a new project in hand: "Some weird science fiction, the kind that only I would be interested in writing."

On the tombstone that remembers the writer Cesare PaveseIn the cemetery of Santo Stefano Belbo, his hometown, one of the last phrases of The craft of living –the diary in which, among many other matters, he ends up announcing the gesture final (that of his suicide): "I have given poetry to men." He gave it to them in verse and prosaic form, and made the effort – successful – to understand the human soul, even though he drowned in his own.