<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - literature]]> 10 <![CDATA[Of truths there are many]]> A novel permeated by the breath of William Faulkner and the darkness of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. A novel constructed from the investigation of narratological mechanisms, full of perspectives and contradictions, in the manner of the prodigious Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. A novel with golden voices like those of the enigmatic and sick characters of Clarice Lispector. A novel that dialogues with international literature but is made in our land, and with beautiful winks to masters from here like Mercè Rodoreda and Jaume Cabré. A novel, indeed, that speaks tellurically of the territory, digging its fingers like roots into an extreme and fascinating land. A novel that seems like History because it has known how to use the gears of fiction, a precious lie, to reach raw human truths. A powerful, polyphonic, and wild novel. A novel that exists: Bèsties en el foc, by Joan Roure, published by La Magrana. This formidable work rises like a verbal cathedral of almost mystical intensity, a dark and incandescent song that originates from Ponent – a land that is not a backdrop, but rather energetically nourishes the author's imagination and imbues the work with a moral and symbolic density that dialogues with the rawness of the multiplied history that unfolds – to become a radical exploration of memory, guilt, and uncertainty. Through the voices of Mateu, Ramon, and Carme, the narrative unfolds like a choral architecture of devastating power where abused childhood becomes a witness and the word, a form of redemption. With a landscape of mists and silences that becomes almost another character, Joan Roure constructs a story of forbidden loves, hidden passions, and long-concealed confessions that, upon emerging, devastate everything. The novel is a burning immersion into the darkest corners of the human soul, where madness and lucidity touch, and where literature, in its most sublime gesture, becomes a form of poetic justice capable of illuminating what time had condemned to muteness. The themes it touches upon are most interesting: how wounded consciences add fuel to the bath of traumas that bog down spirits, various forms of emotional and physical survival in times of misery, political dissent, resistance networks, and the rough friction of opposing viewpoints not as a communicative impossibility but as an expression of the chaos that grounds us. For all these reasons, Bèsties de foc, by Joan Roure, is an admirable narrative artifact where truth is never univocal and the reader is invited to inhabit ambiguity, to read between the lines, and to enjoy the terrible and beautiful mysteries of the world and of life. Without a doubt, an essential book from now on.

]]> <![CDATA[Saint George or the great illusion of the book: much ado about nothing in literature?]]>

After Sant Jordi, it seems appropriate to take stock. The book world seems to be heading, in recent years, towards a celebration of cultural commerce in which a good part of the annual turnover is concentrated on a single day. It is still good news that the festival of the rose and the book continues to be so well received, and that there are so many people who still have the desire to give a book and a rose to their loved one. A few years ago, things were such that men bought the rose and women the book, but the macho undertone of this exchange has tended to dissipate (nobody wants to remember that detail). It is evident that if everyone buys a book for Sant Jordi (which also doesn't happen, let's not fool ourselves) the business can do very well, because selling two million books in one day is no small feat (but there are more than two million Catalan speakers; little desire to spend, and even less to read). But, if we look at the number of books the best-selling author can place on that day alone, we see that it will hardly reach 30,000 copies (their title does not represent even 1% of total sales); in other words: the most important thing is of no importance. All those books we call ‘best sellers’, books that adapt to popular tastes, only represent 6% of the total books sold that day. Nor should it be added that only a little more than half of the books sold are in Catalan, with percentages that tend to equalize, unfortunately, year after year. And if it's about selling popular books, we can't expect that, once certain books have become 'mass culture', these works will be the ones that stand out most for their aesthetic or literary values –or for their intellectual merit. There are still people who are surprised when they see how bad bad literature can be, and it is even admirable that high culture dedicates more effort to sinking what the market has elevated than to lifting what, being excellent, goes more or less unnoticed and doesn't bring in any money. It goes without saying that this phenomenon shows more resentment and snobbery than genuine concern for the state of culture. That Sant Jordi is a celebration of commercial or popular literature should not scare anyone, because the next day (Sant Fidel) we can continue going to bookstores and take home, without queues or crowds, the true wonders that are still being published by editors who have not turned into pimps for ideological propaganda disguised as 'for everyone' narrativity. What we know as literature, or good literature, will never die, but it will have an increasingly reduced role and place in culture, a phenomenon that each passing day moves further away from what it should be ( an exhibition and learning of possible excellence) to become a simulation of cultural or ideological integration: in the celebration of the cliché, or of that which is most sweat-soaked and predictably innocuous, of what we already know reinforced with propaganda and trinkets. 

]]> <![CDATA[Ibiza publisher seeks geeks who want to write novels]]>

It doesn't come from pop, nor from polp. ‘Pulp’ comes from pulp, from the wood pulp that was used in the first half of the 20th century in the United States to print absolutely over-the-top horror or science fiction stories that are typical of the genre. The paper was coarse, brownish, very ugly, very cheap. The content, too: Martians abducting a family on a lonely rural property, a city sunk into the sea and ruled by robots, a comet carrying spectral warriors from another dimension...

]]> <![CDATA[I need wings to fly]]> With his first film (The 400 Blows), François Truffaut began a cinematic cycle starring a fictional character (Antoine Doinel, alter ego of Truffaut himself) who embodied different films, always played by the same actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud). From this filmed continuum, the beloved French filmmaker was able to explore the complex and exciting paths of a human being's life. I thought of this artistic example while reading Pere Joan Martorell's new and ambitious novel, Nits sense ales (Nights without wings) from Pagès Editors, as through its pages we can once again encounter a character who has starred in other works by the Lloseta writer, such as the Llibre de les revelacions (Book of Revelations) (Editorial Moll, 2007), because Amador is, in effect, Martorell's correspondent in possible parallel and quantum universes. In a literary adventure that connects him with Solenoide, by Mircea Cărtărescu, Pere Joan Martorell does not recreate his life in the mirror of fiction, but reinvents it from turning points that could have occurred, and thus recovers Amador, a psychologist and writer in a center dedicated to behavioral disorders. But every story begins with a turning point, that is, with a change, a disorder, and it is here when the appearance of Judith, a young woman marked by a past of brutal violence and abuse, activates a narrative mechanism of high emotional tension. Her voice, which emerges with difficulty between shame and urgency, challenges the therapist and destabilizes him to the point of forcing him to confront his own limits. It is then that the work unfolds like a progressive infernal descent towards the most opaque zones of the mind and society, with a highly symbolic language and images of powerful impact. The world that is drawn around the characters, with the presence of a sordid network of domination and exploitation, is not merely a setting that draws from a real case: it acts as an amplifier of internal conflicts. But what truly sustains the novel is its formidable ability to show how evils are not only external, but above all intimate, embedded in memory and the body. Martorell develops a story that skillfully moves through the margins of moral ambiguity, exploring the fine line that separates compassion from desire.With a ductile and intensely expressive prose, which knows how to alternate sharp cuts with moments of restorative delicacy, Nits sense ales, by Pere Joan Martorell, is a striking account of vulnerability and the search for redemption, a novel that delves without concessions into the most fragile and uncomfortable territories of human experience, where wound and desire are confused and where the need for empathy becomes almost a matter of survival.

]]> <![CDATA["What a shame to be poor": Palma lives a Sant Jordi full of books, roses and good weather]]>

"What a shame to be poor", one reader of romantasy tells another as she considers a hardcover edition with a colored spine of Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros's bestselling saga. After a brief debate with her friend and several knowing glances, the book ended up in the bookseller's hands and the credit card did the rest. Transaction completed, happy reader. The scene took place in the space that one of the main bookstores has set up for Sant Jordi in Plaça d'Espanya in Palma. Like this one, hundreds, perhaps thousands, have been repeated this Book Day.

]]> <![CDATA[Saint George fills the streets of Palma with literature]]> <![CDATA[Saint George fills Palma's streets with literature]]> <![CDATA[Sant Jordi gains momentum beyond Palma]]>

That Saint George has taken flight in recent years is a fact that is noted every April 23 in Palma. If last year two caparrots were premiered there, confirming its character as a traditional festival, this year the festival has begun almost a week earlier with a prior fair in the neighborhoods of the City. Nevertheless, the momentum of Book Day has also been felt outside Palma: throughout the Balearic Islands, numerous bookstores are preparing since February for one of the most important days of the year.

]]> <![CDATA[Jaume Oliver reinvents history with "a spy novel in a Palma that never existed"]]>

The writer Jaume Oliver Ripoll reinvents the history of the Civil War in One Day We Will Assault the City with Iron Horses, "a spy novel in a Palma that never existed", in which he fantasizes about a victory for the Republic that turns Mallorca into the seat of a government led by three women. His second book, with which he won the last Ciutat de Palma Novel Prize, "is a uchronia embedded in a dystopia", as well as "a vindication of the city and historical memory", a story "with many layers" that is, in synthesis, an adventure novel, he explains in an interview with EFE.

]]> <![CDATA[Vilafranca gives its nod to Book Week with a Poetry Marathon that will bring together 40 voices from the Pla]]>

Vilafranca de Bonany will kick off the Book Week in the municipality with the celebration of the II Poetic Marathon, which will take place on Friday, April 17, and Saturday, April 18, at Restaurant d’Eliss (Ctra. Palma, 29).

]]> <![CDATA[Four and a half recommendations]]>

What do you want, to sell a lot or to write well?Speaking of the difficulty of living off what I write, a colleague posed this painful question to me.Let's be clear: publishing houses are not charity organizations, but businesses like any other, they have to pay salaries and survive in a complex cultural context: surrounded by two very powerful cultures, the authors of this small country insist on writing in Catalan, without any powerful state to support us, with Portuguese institutions that don't quite believe in it, with booksellers who have limited space and receive new releases every week with the support of large groups with a powerful promotional machinery that usually prioritizes non-literary criteria.I suppose the goal would be to make culture in Catalan profitable. And this is where consumers have a lot to say. What books do you buy? Are you aware that we hold in our hands the most effective way to make Catalan culture profitable? Well, buy a lot of books, and buy books written in Catalan.To make an impact, I'll give you four and a half recommendations for books written by Balearic authors that, if we had a normal country, would be among the bestsellers.– Winter Sun. Dora Muñoz. Edicions Xandri. July 1939: a group of Majorcans heading to the popular Olympics in Barcelona found themselves caught between two worlds, quite literally: Republican Catalonia and Francoist Mallorca. They left for three days, which ended up being three years.Muñoz shows us her great versatility (have you read Errada de comptes, her latest crime novel? It's also fantastic!). Here she changes register and hooks us with a great command of narrative tension, which is not easy at all. Sol d’hivern is a story based on a real event, and life very often doesn't fit literary tempos, but Muñoz knows how to keep us hooked on the story.– How do you want, brothers, for me to sing? Joan Pons Bover is doing fantastic promotion for this novel, with a piercing lyricism, a tribute to lost loves, to the grief of what never was. Published by Illa Edicions, with two temporal arcs, from the desolate routine of a nursing home to the despair of losing one's first love in post-war Formentera. A breathtaking book, written with a careful and precious language that you won't be able to stop reading.

]]> <![CDATA[The million]]> The endowment of a new literary prize in the Spanish state has caused some controversy. In theory, according to the rules, the books that can be awarded one million euros by Aena have been published the previous year in one of the official languages of the State, although, now that we know who the five finalists were (all will receive 30,000 euros, except the winner, Samanta Schweblin, who will take the million) they are in Spanish. Catalan authors could opt for it, provided that the work has a Spanish translation, since it seems that juries do not necessarily have to know how to read in Catalan, Basque or Galician. I don't know what happens with works written in other official languages that are published in Spanish but not in the same year as their original publication: we can assume that they are no longer eligible for prizes. This enormously hinders any author in Catalan, for example, from ever being able to aspire to this award, even being a finalist is already a pipe dream. In this first call, which could be programmatic, all the books have been in Spanish. When an author wins the Planeta prize, now endowed with a million, they don't really win any prize: they receive an advance on sales, so that if the book sold more than a million copies, money would still have to be added (which I don't think has ever happened…). The Planeta is for an unpublished work, for a typescript that authors submit to the award; but not this new Aena prize, which recognizes a work that is already published, and which, as we can see, has a more literary profile, or more of a personal and 'risky' literature, beyond formulaic novels or more or less successful successful strategies that sell well and tend to feed the publishing business. But the endowment of this prize –so large– is raising a certain controversy, for its nouveau riche character, for the brutal ostentation of power (the company Aena is half public) and for the imbalance, I would like to add, with the finalists, or with what has been done –ignoring them– with other books published in also official languages. It is very likely that none of the current finalists will ever sniff such a sum of money again (not even by winning the Nobel, as Vila-Matas, another finalist, is said to be able to do). Such an award can put an end to a writer's literary career, needless to say: it can professionalize them, if that is what they desire, but it will also draw a spotlight on their work that can be counterproductive, or even unnecessary. Because one thing is to make a living selling books to readers who appreciate you, and another is to be able to retire because an institution – an airport one – has chosen you more for the benefit of its cultural prestige than for yours. And all in a week in which we have learned that a lot of Catalan publishing houses see their survival in danger because it turns out they don't have I don't know what seal that certifies the environmentalism of the paper they print with… And when newspapers publish less serious literary criticism than ever in their history, criticism that should arbitrate taste much better and much sooner than the juries of writers who judge other writers (who will judge them in the future).  

]]> <![CDATA[The pillars of the Mediterranean]]> Last Easter Sunday, in a gesture that was both solemn and sly, very much in his provocative and vitalist way of being, one of the most important authors of Catalan literature bridging the 20th and 21st centuries died: Josep Piera. Heir to Ausiàs Marc, but also to Cavafis and Penna and Bufalino, he was one of the poets of the 70s generation who burst onto the scene with the most force: in the mythical Tafal collection –led by Andreu Vidal and Àngel Terron– he published one of his best titles, Drafts of Music. Over the years he also became a great narrator (Tale of the Return) and a referential prose writer with unforgettable essays, such as the one about his Neapolitan stay (A Beautiful Baroque Corpse), and diaries full of atavistic wisdom on par with the volumes of one of his masters, Josep Pla (especially noteworthy is the very brutal Whore of the Post-War).Josep Piera, collaborator of the photographer Toni Catany in the sensational work Visions de Tirant lo Blanc, was a poet not only because he had managed to write some of the most powerful verses in our history, but above all for his open attitude, perpetually vital despite personal and collective difficulties, and it was in this way that he managed that the saying “between being a poet and living there is a beautiful possibility that is living poetically” by his admired Joan Vinyoli – to whom he dedicated the precious book Vinyoliana– ended up being an existential banner. His intuition also helped him to understand, very early on, that the Catalan Countries are fortunate to be in a splendid corner: the heart of the Mediterranean. From this axis, he built a very coherent personal cosmogony steeped in tradition that sings this space of commerce, exchange, dialogue, creation, and passions. Broadening this thread, he dedicated part of his efforts to translating Andalusian poets (Trobadors amb turbant) and to navigating our sea and our landscapes. From this organic fervor, he offered us his latest book published a few months ago, Tot són ones from Editorial Afers, a collection of articles that read as if they were prose poems or fragments of a secret autobiography steeped in personal adventures and novelistic flair. Tot són ones is a choral ode in which Josep Piera sublimates his concept of Mediterranean. From beating squares to intimate landscapes charged with memory and desire, the book unfolds a psychogeographical cartography where each place is both origin and projection. The work thus becomes a conscious celebration of a shared civilization that not only recognizes the cultural and literary ties that have forged the author's voice, but reactivates them as a commitment, a will for belonging and continuity, a vital feast. Tot són ones is, indeed, the golden seal of a canonical trajectory that reaches its end. I already miss you, Pep.

]]> <![CDATA[Joana M. Pastor publishes 'Ales de fang', the conclusion of her Mallorcan fantasy saga]]>

The fantasy saga El món món màgic de Lot comes to its conclusion with the publication of the fifth volume, Ales de fang, which will be released coinciding with Sant Jordi's Day 2026. The work brings to a close a literary universe of Majorcan fantasy initiated in 2018 and created by the Palma-based writer Joana M. Pastor Perelló.

]]> <![CDATA[Triptych landed (I): With spines]]> When I met Jaume Reus, I had deeply engraved in my third eye the intense expression of a little boy of nine or ten years old at the Viu l'Estiu camps, who refused to go to bed at Victory shouting: "I want to live! I don't want to sleep!". I wouldn't be surprised if I've already told you: he really passed on the premise to us; even to me, who has always enjoyed lazing around with a good book all morning, but counting, amidst insomnia, the hours that the body (with its essential demands) deducts from my anecdotal passage through the earth. I ponder it and the poet Jaume C. Pons Alorda appears to me, eyes wide open and ears perked to all the canteranos of all the writers in the universe, who admires and listens to "the paper moth, / the weevil of existence", while ecstatically squeaking that "the party is the suicide of the flesh, and satisfaction / is the Deicide / perpetual / of the forest / and of misery" (El corc. Labreu, 2025). I hear his keyboard echoing –euphoric, naturally self-destructive.

]]> <![CDATA[The Mallorcan Roser Amills publishes a novel about the youth of Gabriel García Márquez]]>

The writer and journalist Roser Amills (Algaida, Mallorca, 1974) will publish her fifth novel on May 6, El librero de Macondo, with the José Manuel Lara Foundation, part of the Planeta Group. The work narrates the relationship between two extraordinary figures: the young Gabriel García Márquez and his mentor and friend Ramon Vinyes i Cluet, exiled in Colombia after the Spanish Civil War and a key figure in the formation of the Colombian writer, as informed by the author.

]]> <![CDATA["Poetry is useless and necessary in this system of war"]]>

The exoskeleton is not the title of a zoology book. Or is it. It is the title of Jèssica Ferrer's latest poetry collection, a work that won the Maria Mercè Marçal prize and has just arrived in bookstores. In her first book, Som aquí, Ferrer described massacres from the pig's point of view; now, in an exercise that lies between entomology and metaphysics, she speaks of the limits of the 'I' and the 'we' using the exoskeleton as a metaphor; the exoskeleton is the external skeleton found, for example, in ants. Between Som aquí (2022) and L’exoesquelet (2026), Ferrer has also had time to publish Fissures (2023), which constitutes one of the most dazzling careers in Catalan poetry in recent times. Jèssica Ferrer was born in Ibiza in 1993; in addition to writing, performing with Ses Honorables Virtuts Il·lògiques, and promoting the publication of Revista 078, in the summer she cultivates the garden and collects carob beans.

]]> <![CDATA["If you have more money than me can you decide where I can live? Why?"]]>

Between an essay and some memoirs and halfway between an allegation and a question, with as much rigor as personal perspective. This is the ground where Llucia Ramis's (Palma, 1977) latest book, Un metro cuadrado, written and published thanks to the No Ficció award from Libros del Asteroide, is situated. In it, the return to all the houses where she has lived serves the writer and journalist as a common thread to delve into all the ingredients with which the current housing crisis has been cooked. The Catalan version, published by Anagrama, will go on sale on May 13.

]]> <![CDATA["Poetry does not spare you any pain"]]>

A new award is added to the career of Sebastià Alzamora (Llucmajor, 1972), already recognized with awards such as the Carles Riba, the Sant Jordi and the Jocs Florals de Barcelona, among others. But upon receiving the Josep Maria Llompart for best poetry work in Catalan for Sala Augusta, followed by Llengua materna (Proa), awarded by the Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (AELC) within the framework of the Cavall Verd awards, the writer considers that he is the one who is added to a list of authors who, he says, he hopes not to disappoint. Miquel Martí i Pol, Vicent Andrés Estellés and Antònia Vicens, among others, have received it before him. “It gives a special thrill because those who recognize your work are your colleagues, the people with whom you share your profession,” he confesses.

]]> <![CDATA[The masks of virtue]]> For years I have been fascinated by the life and work of Iris Murdoch, one of the most extraordinary writers of the 20th century, and I am delighted to have become one of her most staunch defenders, as an exalter of her verbal prodigies but also as a translator of some of her best novels. That is why I am pleased that a selection of her essays is now reaching our language and our culture. Because, although there are books that invite us to think, the most important ones are those that invite us to rethink, that is, textual mechanisms that are actually machinery of words and thoughts that incite us to understand why we think as we think. Existentialists and Mystics. Writings on Philosophy and Literature, by Iris Murdoch, published by La Blanca at Edicions 62 with an excellent translation and clarifications by Maria-Arboç Terrades, clearly belongs to this happy category. We are faced with a compendium of writings that not only are founded on the pillars of philosophy and literature, but also question their limits and essences, and above all propose moral reflections of the utmost, strict, necessity. And this, in an increasingly immoral and sordid world – amidst vile wars in Iran and Ukraine and the appalling revelation of the declassified Epstein archives revealing a global network of prostitution, pedophilia, and satanic rituals –, is fundamental, I would even dare to say, a triumph. The volume, very well chosen and prefaced by the philosopher, writer, and editor Raül Garrigasait, allows access to an essayist Iris Murdoch who is, at the same time, traditional and singular, incisive and uncomfortable, illuminating and blinding, crystal clear and questioning, forceful and ironic. Although she appreciates Sartre's contributions, it is ultimately the decisive influence of Plato and the mystics that forms the basis of her system of ideas, a cosmos that constantly claims the moral dimension of art. It is also important to highlight the connections with Simone Weil's concept of alterity and empathy when Iris Murdoch argues that the best literature is a school of attention, a way of learning to see with more precision and less ego. Undoubtedly, one of the most stimulating elements ofExistentialists and Mystics is the balance between ethical rigor and aesthetic theory: Murdoch never completely separates these two spheres, and this makes the book a constellation of sparks that feed back into each other.Existentialists and Mystics, by Iris Murdoch, is a profoundly enriching, shamelessly exciting read, a brilliant edition that means the legacy of this brilliant author is reaching our shores as it deserves.

]]>