12 new km0 releases for Palma's Catalan Book Week

The arrival of September means an almost complete change of display windows in most bookstores in the Balearic Islands: the flood of new titles arriving for Catalan Book Week, an event taking place in Palma from September 17 to 21 in the Misericordia Gardens, grows year after year, although it's still far from the unmatched wave that's arriving. Among them, there are also an increasing number of titles with ties to the Islands, whether through the author, the publisher, or the subject matter, confirming the healthy state of literature produced in the Archipelago. This is the ARA Baleares selection, made from among the dozens of new releases that will fill the displays of this literary event once again this year.

'A submerged light'

Marc Cerdó

Editor's Club. Fiction

After reading everything that was contained in Xesca Ensenyat's youth library, the place where the writer kept manuscripts, documents and texts that she did not share with anyone, her son, the writer Marc Cerdó, talks in A submerged lightThe novel was born with the desire to keep Ensenyat's presence alive beyond his physical death, and serves to reflect a love that is "sometimes toxic, oxidative, and catastrophic," as Cerdó defined it in a conversation with ARA Baleares. "I took the determination to search, among the papers that survived you, for answers to the enigma that your figure inspires in me," the author writes.

'The man who sold the world'

Melchor Comas

Proa. Narrative

The writer from Pobler, Melchor Comes, returns with a novel that follows the line of some of his most relevant works, such as All mechanisms and On the impure land, a work that won him awards such as the Crexells and the Crítica Serra d'Or. The protagonist of this new book, The man who sold the worldis Simó Diarte, a communications and advertising expert whose clients include a candidate for mayor of Barcelona who bears little resemblance to what he truly wants for the city. Populism and identity crises come together in this work, permeated by the author's now-familiar sarcasm.

'Take up your cross'

Antonia Vicens

laBreve. Poetry

"Silence cuts your legs / the wind / bends / the wings of birds," says one of the first poems in the collection Take up your cross, the new collection of poems by Antònia Vicens. The Mallorcan writer, winner of the Catalan Letters Honorary Award, publishes a new book one year after her novel Call the wandering death, tell me where you are going, both closely linked to the Civil War, and returns to verse five years after Father, what do we do with the dead mother?"As a doll, I was happy because I believed in the heaven they'd sold me," she said in an interview with ARA, "but all that was reduced to nothing. If I could regain my faith, pain and death would have meaning."

'Thank you'

Carme Riera

Editions 62. Non-fiction

Fifty years after Carme Riera's debut, I leave you, love, the sea as a pledgeThe writer looks back to record everything that writing and supporting readers has meant to her throughout her career. "I didn't need to search far to begin this text, which is addressed to all of you, dear readers, and perhaps even more so, dear readers, because, within reach, the word thank you, one of my favorites, is the one that best sums up what I want to convey," she summarizes in the first paragraph of a book where she speaks of memories.

'Ears of Bloom and The Return'

Maria Antonia Salvá

Barcino Publishing House. Poetry

This September, the 'Imprescindibles – Biblioteca de clásico Catalanes' collection from Barcino Publishing will include a volume that brings together two books of poems by Llucmajorera Maria Antònia Salvà: Spikes in flower, the author's second collection of poems, published in 1926, and The return, where Salvà pays homage to the land from multiple perspectives. Edited by Lluïsa Julià and featuring an afterword by Maria Callís Cabrera, the volume serves to vindicate the legacy of the Mallorcan author, both for her influence on other Catalan writers and for her connection to the land, language, and tradition.

'The woodworm'

Jaume C. Pons Alorda

laBreve. Poetry

Like "a cannibalistic feast of books and verses." This is how laBreu defines Jaume C. Pons Alorda's new collection of poems, a definition that could be applied to a significant portion of his work and confirmed by the ending of the poem that opens the collection, 'Preliminars'. "Reading is copulating / and writing is sticking / forks in the body / and telescopes in the soul. / Let the orgy begin," proposes the Caimari native, later unburdening himself in another poem dedicated to a "destroyer of worlds, ill-fated, oh! ill-fated, ill-born and ill-born and ill-born and bad to be with, well-fattened, with big buns, blood sausages."

'The Fable'

William of Torroella

New Muelle Publishing House. Fiction

We are in Mallorca at the end of the 14th century: this is the context in which Guillem de Torroella began to write The fable, a book of chivalry with which he fictionalized his own abduction and constructed a thrilling adventure across the sea, written in an Occitan language replete with Catalan expressions. The Mallorcan poet Miquel Àngel Llauger has now produced a new version adapted to modern Catalan. It also preserves the original meter and rhyme, using octosyllable pairings. It is published in a bilingual edition that allows us to appreciate both the translator's work and the unique features of the original text.

'As long as I have a shred of breath left'

Pilar Arnau

Quid Pro Quo. Nonfiction

From family life in Galicia to his work at Editorial Moll, through his law studies in Barcelona or his work as deputy director of Son Armadans Papers. As part of the Llompart Year, the publishing house Quid Pro Quo publishes a complete biography of Josep Maria Llompart –with the revealing subtitle A versatile man at the service of the country–, edited by Pilar Arnau. Organized by chronological chapters, the book reviews Llompart's many facets as a literary historian and translator, among others, and also analyzes his contributions to language standardization.

'Entreforce'

Maria Garcia

Fonoll Publishing House. Poetry

"Just as we have often heard about the great American novel or the great novel about Barcelona, ​​​​we could see in Reinforcement "something like a kind of big book of poems about the island of Mallorca." This is how the jury of the Joan Duch poetry prize for Young Writers of Juneda summarized the essence ofReinforcement, a collection of poems by Catalan author Maria Garcia Garau, who defines herself as a "daughter of Mallorcans who yearn for each other." In one of the verses in the book, where poems and illustrations share the spotlight, the author asks: "What does the roar coming from the mouth of this island of ours say?".

'Between Two Dark Ones'

Antoni Vidal Ferrando

Proa. Poetry

The publication of Antoni Vidal Ferrando's poetry collection coincided with his eightieth birthday celebration. With the same freedom as always, and with all the experience of a life dedicated to poetry and literature, Vidal Ferrando once again explores the wonders and horrors of the world in Between two dark ones, a collection that navigates between the past and the future, guided more by doubts than certainties. "It's been a while since I saw flocks of children playing in the street or flocks of pigeons breaking the still air with their wings," the author writes, adding that "sometimes it's as if I've already begun to stop living where I live."

'Nothing was left'

Maria Escalas

Now Books. Fiction

Once again, Maria Escalas draws on real events to create a fiction that also serves to construct memories. As she did with the Ciutat de Palma Award-winning novel, Matilde E., which revived the story of composer Matilde Escalas, the author now focuses on the literal disappearance of the village of Llers, located in Girona, which took place on February 8, 1939, after the Republican army detonated the powder magazine located in the church. In this case, Escalas draws on anonymous characters and well-known figures to recreate this tragic episode and its consequences.

'Forest, whale, fog'

Josep l. Badal

Lleonard Muntaner Editor.Narrativa

The stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Romanial Flower and Sleeping Beauty are the seeds from which the writer Josep l. Badal builds three new fables in Forest, whale, fog, one of the main new releases presented by the Lleonard Muntaner Editor imprint for this fall. In this volume, the always innovative and surprising author, winner of the Folch i Torres Prize, among others, sets out to reinvent popular narrative without abandoning the violence, sensuality, and evil present in the original legends, which have also transcended our way of seeing and understanding the world.