The art of reconnecting with nature, an atlas that graphically explains how the land in which we live determines our entire existence, a guide that invites us to lose ourselves and embrace the unknown, the chronicle of the deadliest day in one of the most deadly mountains. dangerous or the exciting personal adventures of a writer in search of his roots. Ten very travel literary novelties to escape this summer, wherever you are.
'A real change. A return to the origin in the land of shepherds'
Seix Barral. 19.50 euros.
After traveling around the world and writing about such remote places as Patagonia, the Hindu Kush massif or the Australian Great Barrier, the writer Gabi Martínez (Barcelona, 1971) returns with this moving account of his experience as an apprentice sheep herder in Extremadura Siberia (Badajoz), the rough, beautiful and essential territory where her mother lived as a child. From the shepherd Juan Alfredo you will learn the hard trade of herding sheep and tricks such as "doing the clock": staying still and speaking in a calm tone, turning slowly on the soles of your feet and slowly backing away if you come face to face with a Wolf.
'A guide to the art of getting lost'
Captain Swing. 16 euros.
“The world is blue in its extremes and in its depths (...) For many years I have been moved by the blue of the extreme of the visible, that color of the horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything located in the distance ”. This delightful essay has just been published in which Rebecca Solnit addresses everything from the ultramarine color of Renaissance painters to their fascination for transcendent and empty spaces: “Once I loved a man who was very similar to the desert, and before that I loved the desert. It was not because of concrete things, but because of the space between them, because of that abundance of absence ”. The author of Wanderlust, a walking story invites you to wander again through mountains and forests; to embrace the unknown without fear, to seek the meaning of life in times of uncertainty and longing for horizons.
'Barcelona'
Editorial Tintablanca. 28.90 euros.
The Catalan capital, with texts by the black novel writer Carlos Zanón and illustrations by Lara Costafreda, is the new city presented by the Tintablanca publishing house, a careful collection of travel books and writing notebooks. Included with each title are 46 blank pages for annotations and a 16-page booklet of heavyweight drawing paper for sketches and watercolors, along with a set of stickers to customize the cover. The same publisher offers notebooks, in large or pocket format, with 160 blank pages and another 16 of special paper for sketches (21.90 and 16.90 euros).
'Prisoners of geography'
Geoplanet. 15.95 euros.
Empires, political systems, and kings pass. The territory, however, is always there. Faced with the temporality of leaders and ideas, rivers, mountains and seas prevail. With this premise, the veteran British war correspondent Tim Marshall wrote in 2015 Prisoners of Geography (Peninsula), an essential work to understand the conflicts in the current world that Geoplaneta now presents in an atlas version and aimed at a young and curious audience, with illustrations by Grace Easton and Jessica Smith.
'The natural instinct'
Attic of the Books. 19.90 euros.
Tristan Gooley (London, 1973) is a navigator, adventurer and naturalist. He has only crossed the Atlantic by boat and plane. It is able to orient itself by looking at the inclination of a rock or the night movement of the constellation Orion. He knows how to interpret the language of the forest and the birds. And he tells it in this guide, so that the reader can recover that "sixth sense", today forgotten by most, which allows us to tune in with nature and the rest of living beings.
'Pancha Tantra'
Taschen. 60 euros.
Brutal Beauty, The King of Beasts, Addiction to Heroism, Animal Magnetism, Necropolis ... These are the titles of some of the large-format watercolors by New Yorker Walton Ford (1960), an artist with a nineteenth-century aesthetic heir to nature illustrators such as American James J. Audubon, famous for his North American bird prints. In his works, Ford draws on stories read or imagined to reflect on or satirize the relationship between man and animals, which in the pages of Pancha Tantra show disturbing human behavior. A bestiary that parades lions hunting crocodiles, defiant gorillas, cannibal parrots, snakes devouring flocks of birds ... in disturbing fables of perfect technical execution.
'K2. Buried in the sky '
Captain Swing. 20 euros.
In August 2008, one of the most serious tragedies in the history of mountaineering occurred. A series of accidents and errors that caused the death of 11 people on K2, the second highest mountain on earth (8,611 meters) and one of the most dangerous. With the lives of the two surviving Sherpas - Chhiring Dorje and Pasang Lama - as the common thread of the story, American journalists Amanda Padoan and Peter Zuckerman reconstruct with chilling precision what happened up there in this book now published in Spanish.
'Underground. A journey through the depths of time '
Random House. 23.90 euros.
Chasing a white rabbit in a hurry, Alice, the protagonist of the children's story published in 1865 by Lewis Carroll, entered an underground world full of wonders. Robert Macfarlane, author of The Mountains of the Mind , an exciting book about the attraction to the peaks, now undertakes a journey underground in this essay on the fascination that caves and the underworld have had throughout history in culture , religions and imagination.
'TvBoy: the street is my museum'
Dome Books. 21.90 euros.
A photographic journey through the ephemeral and transgressive work of the graffiti artist TVBoy, alter ego of the Italian based in Barcelona Salvatore Benintende. An urban artist who, in addition to "artistically reconciling" political and football rivals with his works, denounces current and controversial issues such as pollution or the situation of refugees. His latest work is the mural on a wall in the Born neighborhood in homage to George Floyd, the African-American killed by the police on May 25.
'Voracious'
Planet Gastro. 18.95 euros.
In 2005, the Danish chef René Redzepi, from the Noma restaurant, and 11 other chefs from northern Europe launched The Manifesto for The New Nordic Kitchen (the manifesto for the new Nordic kitchen), whose theses unconditionally embraced professionals throughout Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway, under the banner of respect for the environment and recipes based on local agriculture, agricultural traditions and the purity and freshness of seasonal food. For four years, journalist Jeff Gordinier, head of the gastronomy section of Esquire magazine and a contributor to The New York Times newspaper, has accompanied him on his gastronomic adventures around the world and recounts it in a book with the explicit title “that speaks of hunger, not only of food, but of risk, of reinvention, of creative revolution, of connection ”.
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