2023-08-29 16:31:11
Catalan literature once again concentrates its great novelties in the immediate publishing ‘rentrée’, in view of the celebration of Catalan Book Week (September 8 to 17). Names such as Sergi Pàmies, Carlota Gurt or Maria Climent are returning to bookstores. Below these lines, a selection of the most anticipated of the quarter:
‘At two it will be three’. Sergi Pamies
Cream notebooks. August 30
Five years after ‘The art of wearing a raincoat’, Sergi Pamies returns with a new, and always short, volume of the house’s signature stories, on which time, memory and the past hover. He will once again show off the irony, tenderness, eloquence and insight he has poured into titles such as ‘Songs of love and rain’ or ‘The stationary bike’.
‘I’ll say I made it up.’ Marta Marín-Domine
Editions 62. August 30
Winner of the BBVA Sant Joan Prize for novels, Marta Marín-Dòmine he partly bares his feelings by delving deeper with this work tinged with fiction into the distant relationship with his own mother, depressive and mentally unstable, a woman who alternated between seduction and cruelty. This is where the gothic and hard atmosphere comes from the author of ‘Fugir er el memes belle te teniem’ and director of the Born Center Cultural.
‘Disappearance exercises’. Sebastià Perelló
Publishing Club. August 30
Published more than two decades ago, this first book by Sebastià Perelló was untraceable. There are eight stories that transport the reader to places like Istanbul, Lisbon, Vienna and Manaus through uprooted and helpless characters who hide secrets and at the center of which, as happened in ‘The Round Sea’, there is always an island.
‘The librarian from the front’. Berta Garden
universe September 4
Aurora Díaz Plaja, one of the pioneers in promoting children’s literature in Catalonia, moved in the spring of 1938 at the head of the Spanish Civil War with a bibliobus, a mobile library with which she brought books to the republican fighters and the wounded hospitals in the rear. The Barcelona Berta Garden regains its forgotten figure.
‘Biography of foc’ / ‘Biography of fire’. Charlotte Gurt
Bow / Asteroid Books. August 30
After winning the Mercè Rodoreda 2019 with the stories of ‘Cavalcarem tota la nit’ and jumping into the novel with ‘Sola’ (2020), Charlotte Gurt return to the tale with these 14 interrelated stories. The Barcelona-based author investigates topics that obsess her: couple relationships, the need for solitude, the fragility of the human being, irrational infatuation and the countryside/city clash.
‘At home we had an anthem’. Maria Clement
The Other September 6
After the success of her debut, ‘Gina’ (2019), the Amposta writer explores the bonds and tensions between a mother and her two daughters in a story of family secrets and missed opportunities. Three estranged women, very different and with disparate aspirations, will learn to understand each other during a reunion in the heart of Tuscany.
‘Die knowing few things’. Joan Enric Barceló
periscope September 4
The musician and singer Joan Enric Barceló, one of the members of Els Amics de les Arts, makes his debut in literature by printing humor and fine irony in this collection of sharp stories that reveal the small daily frustrations of human beings. These various stories include love disappointments, individual revolts, bereavements and premature deaths.
‘Tiberius Caesar’. Núria Chains
bow October 4
The author of ‘Guillem’, the acclaimed documentary about the case of Guillem Agulló, turns his trajectory in the form of a historical novel to go back to the Roman Empire and focus on the personality of the enigmatic emperor Tiberius, successor to Augustus. A fresco of absolute power, surrounded by ambitions, threats, fears, cruelty and love.
‘Formentera lady’. Jordi Cussà
Comanegra September 13
Foreword by Anna Ballbona and reviewed in depth by the same Jordi Cussàwho died two years ago, this is the definitive edition of ‘Formentera lady’, a kind of continuation of ‘Cavalls salvatgas’, where the depressed writer of Berga reflected the individual and collective experience of the ravages of heroin in the 80s and 90s.
‘Words in the sun’. Maria Antonia Oliver
The Pomegranate October 19
Dead in 2022, the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres Catalanes Maria Antonia Oliver she left this unpublished work that will reach bookstores posthumously: it is an epistolary novel armed with the letters that she and her partner, the writer Jaume Fuster, exchanged while he was Cabrera Island A love story in the gray Francoist Spain of the 60s.
‘Bonus track’
-‘The day the world farted like an eagle’, by Pere Gorgoll (Amsterdam, September 4). Apocalyptic and hilarious sci-fi satire on the dangers of idolatry.
-‘The inhabitants of the 200th floor’, by Elvira Augusta Lewi (Weeds, November 2). Extremely modern and published for the first and last time in 1936, it is one of only two books by this author, who lost track of her after the Civil War.
-‘Camp pervers’, by David Castillo (Proa, November 8). The writer and journalist is publishing poetry again after 12 years. It brings together verses written between 2007 and 2023 about the end of many illusions and the bet on the present in the face of the passage of time.
-‘A happy ending’ by Roser Atmetlla (Navona, September). A young woman’s tumultuous entry into adulthood during one night at a ‘rave’ party.
-‘The need’, by Pasqual Farràs (1984 editions, September 6). A 52-year-old photographer is temporarily trapped on the island of Llatzeret, in Mallorca. There he will discover his most primal drives.
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