The 50 best books of 2021

“As I collapse and begin to think once again that this idea that I can become a writer is an egomaniacal fantasy, I return to the modesty of these notebooks, which are not for anyone, which do not compete with anyone. Nor are they at the risk of anyone's judgment. They with themselves, and I alone with me. It is night ”. This note from the diaries of Rafael Chirbes - chosen

Book of the Year

by a jury of 75 experts - could serve as a literary summary of 2021: in a world that seems to unravel every night and rebuild every morning, the first person abounds, the feeling of imminent cataclysm (political and ecological) and a very critical look at the past.

To the self-analysis practiced without hot cloths by Antonio Muñoz Molina, Emmanuel Carrère, Ida Vitale, Luis Landero, Fernando Aramburu or Chirbes himself is added the review that authors such as Javier Marías, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Gabriela Wiener, Maggie O'Farrell or Leila Slimani make the history of Spain and Latin America and the role of women in a tradition that for centuries has considered them mute or muses, that is, invisible.

As everything is liable to get worse, between the Soviet utopia portrayed by Yuri Slezkine and the European dystopia analyzed by Anne Applebaum, there is room for technological and environmental catastrophes.

Byung-Chul Han and Fernanda Trías speak of them.

Having traced the pandemic hell of 2020, we imagine 2021 as a paradise: it did not go beyond purgatory.

The seventh centenary of Dante has left us that not even painted by Botticelli.

By

By

The expression “literary event”, which has been so abused in recent times, is nevertheless the one that best fits to describe what the publication of the first notebooks of Rafael Chirbes's diaries has meant in the publishing world, a testimony It is called to endure as one of the most interesting writings of the self, both because of the intimate dimension it offers of its author, jealously preserved in life, and because of the literary potential that its pages give off, brimming with a suffering conception of existence and life. writing. We have been many who have read them avidly and many conversations we have had around them. Coradino Vega, who corresponded with him for years, spoke to me of the tenderness he found behind his Marxist armor of a tough man,something that has to do with his class consciousness and also with the circumstances of his childhood, which he never got over. Daniel Ruiz said that reading these newspapers confirmed what he already sensed from his books and interviews: that Chirbes felt outside of everything, displaced, like an intruder in the literary world, impervious to fashions, with a roadmap own. With Jorge Herralde, its incombustible editor, we were talking about the sadness, pessimism, loneliness and sordidness that these notebooks convey. And despite everything, they are a feast, I said. Yes, he agreed, a feast and also the result of a life passionately dedicated to literature: reading and writing, despite so many insecurities.Daniel Ruiz said that reading these newspapers confirmed what he already sensed from his books and interviews: that Chirbes felt outside of everything, displaced, like an intruder in the literary world, impervious to fashions, with a roadmap own. With Jorge Herralde, its incombustible editor, we were talking about the sadness, pessimism, loneliness and sordidness that these notebooks convey. And despite everything, they are a feast, I said. Yes, he agreed, a feast and also the result of a life passionately dedicated to literature: reading and writing, despite so many insecurities.Daniel Ruiz said that reading these newspapers confirmed what he already sensed from his books and interviews: that Chirbes felt outside of everything, displaced, like an intruder in the literary world, impervious to fashions, with a roadmap own. With Jorge Herralde, its incombustible editor, we were talking about the sadness, pessimism, loneliness and sordidness that these notebooks convey. And despite everything, they are a feast, I said. Yes, he agreed, a feast and also the result of a life passionately dedicated to literature: reading and writing, despite so many insecurities.With Jorge Herralde, its incombustible editor, we were talking about the sadness, pessimism, loneliness and sordidness that these notebooks convey. And despite everything, they are a feast, I said. Yes, he agreed, a feast and also the result of a life passionately dedicated to literature: reading and writing, despite so many insecurities.With Jorge Herralde, its incombustible editor, we were talking about the sadness, pessimism, loneliness and sordidness that these notebooks convey. And despite everything, they are a feast, I said. Yes, he agreed, a feast and also the result of a life passionately dedicated to literature: reading and writing, despite so many insecurities.

Although these diaries are a publication thoughtful and prepared for after his death (that is, nothing is left to chance), there is a sorrowful and rapt authenticity, as if the author, once out of this life, wanted to give everything to us, not save us anything, even what hurts himself. In the notes, corresponding to the period between 1985 and 2005, there are descriptions of pain and physical ailments, tormented sexual scenes, juicy reading notes, impressions collected on trips, reflections of a political nature and, above all, doubts, many doubts about his He was worth as a writer, about his true calling, about his inability to sit down and write consistently. Chirbes is sometimes ruthless with others and almost always with himself; His judgments are lapidary, for better and for worse.There are few happy fragments in these diaries and, those that do exist, have more to do with what is read than with what has been written. If any moment of plenitude arises, always conclude with the awareness that time will corrupt it, as it corrupts everything. But you cannot admire the author without recognizing and admitting this dark complexity, as Marta Sanz explains very well in one of the book's prologues, an intelligent invitation to read some notebooks that are, on the one hand, “an act of generosity preconceived ”, but also a“ programmed blasting ”: only those who approach them from these premises will be able to understand everything.But you cannot admire the author without recognizing and admitting this dark complexity, as Marta Sanz explains very well in one of the book's prologues, an intelligent invitation to read some notebooks that are, on the one hand, “an act of generosity preconceived ”, but also a“ programmed blasting ”: only those who approach them from these premises will be able to understand everything.But you cannot admire the author without recognizing and admitting this dark complexity, as Marta Sanz explains very well in one of the book's prologues, an intelligent invitation to read some notebooks that are, on the one hand, “an act of generosity preconceived ”, but also a“ programmed blasting ”: only those who approach them from these premises will be able to understand everything.

The bitterness that beats in his notes has to do with social origin, which the writer himself considers as a disease: “There is no medicine that cures the origin of class, not even the money that can come later, or the social prestige that is acquire (...). It is a wound from whose pain you defend yourself, and even in the face of your own already declassified children you pull out the animal nails from below ”. The other aspect that he carries as a burden is that of repressed, clandestine homosexuality, lived with guilt, dissatisfaction and the inability to give oneself fully, as well as the growing alcoholism and fear of abandonment. “Everything scares me. I feel like a child that a god takes too much care of, with the sole intention of punishing him ", he wrote in 1985, and, 20 years later," This road seems very long and my spirits are getting less and less.My vision is darkening, every day it weighs more than the sun that crushes you ”. There may be contradictions in some of Chirbes's notes, but the coherence of his vital consciousness is frightening: an absolute, immovable consciousness, masterfully represented in the scene of the reunion of students from the orphan school where he studied as a child - for me, one of the best pages in recent testimonial literature.

Those who are already readers of Chirbes will complete with these diaries the portrait of a demanding, implacable and precise writer, with an unusual sensitivity and dedication;

who are not yet will be able to obtain a valuable approach to an indispensable personality of recent literature and will then run to buy his novels,

and many others, so that the feast go on, unstoppable.

Sara Mesa is the author of 'Un amor', the best book of 2020 according to the critics of 'Babelia'

.

• Criticism of Anna Caballé

• Selection of the author's reflections

• Book link in publisher

The best literature makes it possible to illuminate fascinating corners and characters that the society of its time cornered. That's what Maggie O'Farrell does in

: put the light on Anne Hathaway (in the novel she will be Agnes), wife of the famous Shakespeare, building around this mysterious figure one of the most moving novels of the year. This imaginary biography that draws on extensive documentation proposes a wild, half-sorceress and creative Agnes, whose existence was overshadowed by her husband's fame.

is a novel about motherhood and grief, but also about the secret origins of the masterpieces of our time.

The ingenuity that Farrell displays in this work - with a meticulous handling of language and narrative tension - reaches its climax in an extraordinary and exciting ending: the moment in which

and

become the same work, in a tremor almost exact.

By

• Criticism of Marta Sanz

• Interview with Maggie O'Farrell, by Laura Fernández

• Book link in publisher

Like light snowflakes melting on the shoulders, the prose seeps into the soul of the reader of what is already in the extensive list of major works by Javier Marías. Time, precisely, together with tics and beliefs that amass our identity, the vigilant and serious memory, sentinel of one, from which it is impossible to get rid and take responsibility for our decisions and those of others in the shadow of Dostoevsky make up the substrate of the longest novel of the author's half-century literary history. That the Anglo-Spanish spy was interviewed by the voice of third parties in

come out of retirement now to find out which of three women is a terrorist between the IRA and ETA it does not matter beyond the moral dilemmas that, between Greene and Le Carré, fall under the iron control of an unprecedented capacity for digression in Castilian letters , impossible to find a better dance partner between the cadence of the sentences and the thought.

Marías is confirmed in his style, more modern than ever because what is more current than pretending, light loyalties, guilt or loneliness?

By

• Criticism of José-Carlos Mainer

• Interview with Javier Marías, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

• Read the first pages of the book

• Book link in publisher

With the captivating prose to which he has us accustomed, Juan Gabriel Vásquez has achieved

an immense global novel

in

.

As intimate as it is universal, the journey that the Colombian author presents of the life of the filmmaker Sergio Cabrera invites us to peek into some complex and also exuberant decades: the guerrilla history of his country, the emergence of Maoism in China and the vicissitudes of the exiles Spaniards circulate in its pages without ever deviating the shot of individual failures, of powerful resignations and of a construction fully subordinated to the literary rhythm.

A hypnotic and amazing journey that consolidates Vásquez on the podium of maturity.

By

• Criticism of Jordi Gracia

• Mario Vargas Llosa's Tribune

• Read a chapter from 'Look Back'

• Book link in publisher

It is Madrid in that time of isolation. There is the uncertainty, the applause, Elvira, the balcony from which to look at the street and check that no one passes. Months later, that same Madrid with a skeptical rebirth, again the balcony and the plants that provide life. The self-absorption and anger. The moon and the curious and new look of little Eleanor. The routines that fill days but also empty them. That was in Madrid. Very attentive, I read that. I was also, and there I wanted to stay, in that garden that the author's memory offers me. I arrive at that "Eden of sidewalks between fig trees and pomegranates with invisible water ditches." I am caught by Antonio Niño, the son of Paco Cachorro. The childhood home. Úbeda. And the constant bounce of memories. Memory to be able to navigate through an agonizing time. Take a breath to continue.Back to where? Maybe where memory takes us.

By

• Criticism of Domingo Ródenas de Moya

• Interview with Antonio Muñoz Molina, from Manuel Jabois

• Read an excerpt from

  Return to Where

• Book link in publisher

When Ida Vitale won the 2018 Cervantes Prize a few months ago she had published her

Gathered following her usual method: opening the volume with the most recent poems and traveling back in time following an inverse chronology.

The highest award for Spanish letters came two years after the death of her husband, the poet Enrique Fierro, an absence that, according to her own confession, diminished the illusion of recognition.

That same disappointment runs through his new book.

Written with 98 years,

adds an insomniac and elegiac tinge to the usual themes in the Uruguayan poet: the attempt to capture the moment and metapoetic reflection.

Even the light is nuanced by the impossibility of sharing it with the loved one: "Without caresses or the air of a joke / so that nothing is worth, helpless / sun that only casts shadows."

By

• Interview with Ida Vitale, from Berna González Harbor

• Book link in publisher

In the original French the pun does not work, but you could make the joke that Emmanuel Carrère chose the title

because it starts with me. That premise, that of introspective writing, actually defines a constant in his work. With this volume, which does not aspire to narrative contortionism but to become transparent meditation with which to dilute the ego in a transcendent reality - greater than life, as large as literature -, the author starts from his experience in a retreat to invoke his memories, where the personal and the historical are intricate, and reflect, yes, on the practice of yoga as a way of (self) knowledge. Determined to convince us that his books are "the place where you don't lie," the author evokes a terrifying depression treated with hard drugs and electroshocks. We will never know to what extent what is narrated is reliable, it cannot be looked into the minds of others. To glimpse one's own would already be a feat, as this story comes to verbalize.

By

• Criticism of Marc Bassets

• Interview with Emmanuel Carrère, by Marc Bassets

• Marc Bassets article

• The trial for the attacks in Paris, told by Emmanuel Carrère

• Book link in publisher

This is a book that is spinning itself, a personal book, in which Luis Landero tells us, in small chapters, about his childhood, about his hometown, about his first years in Madrid, about old age, about love, the urge to write and the impotence to write.

Also of the difference between the men and women of his house, they slow and solemn, they eager and fast.

Also from a surrealist phrase ("Here we don't work the little mussel"), which has persecuted the author without fainting for many years.

It is not a novel.

Not a rehearsal.

It is Luis Landero wandering before the paper and before us in a delicious book, which gives the impression of not knowing where it is going, but which returns, time and again, to tell us about the only important thing: the complex, exciting, tired and absurd which is the job of living.

By

• Criticism of Jordi Gracia

• Interview with Luis Landero, by Jesús Ruiz Mantilla

• Read a chapter

  from Emerson's Garden

• Book link in publisher

Páradais

is a place far from paradise. It is a claustrophobic place, a closed group of luxury homes in the Mexican state of Veracruz where a rich and obese boy, named Franco, and a poor and dark man, named Polo, get drunk together. Two repulsive characters full of emotional or economic deficiencies who fantasize about violence in a suffocating atmosphere.

is the third novel by the Veracruz writer Fernanda Melchor and, as in her award-winning

, here she masterfully handles the orality of her characters to sweep the reader into the mentality of a murderer. Melchor, who used to be a crime reporter, knows violence from close up, but does not point it here

to the blood left by the narcos of their country, but to the crude structural violence of a deeply unequal society.

There, Polo's mind drowns.

But incidentally, that of your readers.

By

• Criticism of Carlos Pardo

• Article by Camila Osorio

• Interview with Fernanda Melchor, by Antonio Ortuño

• Book link in publisher

With the

Polish historian Anne Applebaum writes a great book of political journalism crossed with her personal history. It is portrayed as an example of the elite who experienced the end of communism as a democratizing hope, but at the same time it assumes that this hope has forked and one of the two roads leads the continent to the dark side. Why has this circle of conservative cosmopolitans that she was a part split between those who have remained faithful to the project of liberal Europeanism and those who have chosen to break with that possibility and embrace national reactionism? That is the question on which the book pivots and is specified in the dialogues it has had with politicians and intellectuals from the continental right who are betraying its democratic commitment. Faced with the dilemma,he discovers his new circle: one where polarization is overcome thanks to pluralism.

By

• Mario Vargas Llosa's Tribune

• Interview with Anne Applebaum, by Jesús Ruiz Mantilla in EPS

• Book link in publisher

A South Korean German-speaking philosopher, Byung-Chul Han competes with Slavoj Zizek to see who publishes an essay on the penultimate burning question first.

This time Han focuses on the digital universe and smartphones to analyze - as always, very critically - the way our attachment to tangible things fades that gave the world a sense of stability: he has finished.

We become information and data fetishists ”.

• Byung-Chul Han's Article on

  Ideas

• Interview with Byung-Chul Han, by Sergio C. Fanjul

• Book link in publisher

In 1931 the mammoth Government House building was inaugurated in front of the Kremlin.

Destined to house the high positions of the CPSU, it ended up becoming a metaphor for the USSR, with its egalitarian utopias and bloody purges.

1,600 dense but exciting pages that synthesize the best of history with the best of microhistory.

• Article by Pilar Bonet

• Column by Antonio Muñoz Molina

• Book link in publisher

A success as long as that of

(2016) would have blocked anyone, but Fernando Aramburu set out to write another novel full of characters and with a narrator who announced his intention to commit suicide from the first moment.

Master in the handling of choral histories, the San Sebastian writer falls back on his feet.

• Criticism of José-Carlos Mainer

• Interview with Fernando Aramburu, by Jesús Ruiz Mantilla in

  EPS

• Book link in publisher

Representative of the most stark self-fiction, Peruvian Gabriela Wiener plunges this time into a two-way story: the death of her father and a crisis in their polyamorous relationship.

Her father was the connection with the family branch that leads her to her great-grandfather, Charles Wiener, the archetype of the looter of cultural property destined for European museums of ethnography.

The crisis puts her in front of her own convictions.

An autopsy in the first person.

• Criticism of Carlos Pardo

• Interview with Gabriela Wiener, from Berna González Harbor

• The other boom of Peruvian literature

  , article in Babelia

• Book link in publisher

Scotsman Douglas Stuart took away the 2020 Booker with his first novel: the narrative recreation of his childhood as a homosexual boy in the working-class Glasgow of the Thatcher era and within a "unstructured" family.

The subject is explosive, but the strength of the novel is not sociological but literary: it resides in the wild spontaneity of its prose.

• Criticism of Javier Aparicio Maydeu

• Interview with Douglas Stuart, by Eduardo Lago

• Book link in publisher

The story of a woman alone in the face of an ecological cataclysm (but before the pandemic) earned the Uruguayan writer the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for the best novel of the year in Spanish.

• Fernanda Trías interview with Camila Osorio

• Article on dystopias in Latin American literature

• Book link in publisher

The death of the father returns the protagonist of this novel to the town where he spent his childhood.

There he meets his mother, increasingly dependent, and his sister, who until then has taken care of his parents, but is not willing to continue doing so.

With these elements, the author of

puts together a story that highlights the observation capacity of a narrator who dynamites all the topics about the family and deep Spain.

• Criticism of J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip

• Interview with Jesús Carrasco, by Antonio Jiménez Barca

• Article by Andrea Aguilar on books dealing with the return home

• Book link in publisher

Paul Auster has decided to use his fame to draw attention to a crucial writer in his training — Stephen Crane, author of

— and

indulge in

a painstaking 1,000-page literary critique.

Thorough and, it must be said, masterful.

• Criticism of José María Guelbenzu

• Interview with Paul Auster, by Eduardo Lago

• Book link in publisher

"Poetisa is a sweet word / that we put aside because it embarrassed us."

Thus begins this poem-book that the Argentine writer published in June, shortly before she died.

Although the word poem falls short, because it is a very original synthesis of personal and generational memory, essay and narration ... in verse.

• In memoriam

  for Tamara Kamenszain, by Edgardo Dobry

• Book link in publisher

After succeeding with

(Goncourt Award, 2016), Slimani focuses on his own family to tell the story of his Alsatian grandmother in colonial Morocco.

Symbol of oppression for being white and French, she was mistrusted for that very reason.

• Leila Slimani Tribunes:

  What a passport says

  and

  Disconnected

• Interview with Leila Slimani, by Àlex Vicente

• Report on Ideas by Berna González Harbor:

  What it's like to feel “Moorish”: six writers of Arab origin tell their experiences

• Book link in publisher

In 1996 American doctors began to prescribe OxyContin. The introduction and

of this legal drug would be the main cause of the opioid crisis in the United States, considered an epidemic since 2015. Years later, in October 2017, the weekly

published the

report

Its author was Patrick Radden Keefe and its protagonists were the three brothers who founded the Sackler saga, the philanthropists behind the pharmaceutical company that promoted OxyContin. By that time Radden should have already delivered to his editor

, a non-fiction masterpiece that chronicles the political violence in Ireland with mind-boggling tension.

In his article, Radden reconstructed family history and, in the end, held the family responsible for the tragedy.

And three years later he was going to display that same obsession with truth in

.

• Criticism of Jordi Amat

• Article on

  The Empire of Pain

  by Carles Geli

• Read an excerpt from

  The Empire of Pain

• Book link in publisher

Algunos acontecimientos históricos pueden verse como estallidos que generan una onda expansiva que se propaga, en el tiempo y en el espacio, más allá de la muerte del ordenamiento político en el que se encarnaron. Es el caso de la URSS, un proyecto que, según señala el historiador Karl Schlögel, no fue solo un sistema político, sino un modo de vida, un conjunto de prácticas y valores: una civilización. Schlögel lo cuenta en El siglo soviético (Galaxia Gutenberg), un gran viaje que cartografía los restos del naufragio que Vladímir Putin calificó como la mayor catástrofe geopolítica del siglo XX.

• Artículo de Andrea Rizzi
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Donde muere la muerte es, con 24 poemas, el libro más corto de Francisco Brines, fallecido en mayo pasado. Se demoró 25 años en escribirlo, y en los últimos años explicaba su morosidad diciendo, en broma, que ponerle punto final significaría ponérselo también a su vida. Cerrado el libro, él moriría. Como en una maldición de fábula. Estos poemas contienen todas las claves del poeta valenciano: su casa en Oliva; sus padres (a los que dedica algunos de los mejores versos); la tensión entre vejez e infancia, Dios y Luzbel; la soledad; la noche como refugio erótico, la apelación al futuro…

• Crítica de Javier Rodríguez Marcos
• Obituario de Francisco Brines (20/5/2021)
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Tras sumergirse en la psicología de un preadolescente en Las lealtades, Delphine de Vigan bucea en Las gratitudes en lahistoria de Michka, una anciana que ingresa en una residencia, donde se va apagando a medida que avanza su afasia y olvida su mayor tesoro, las palabras. La intrahistoria personal y la historia del siglo XX se cruzan en la última obra publicada en España de una de las grandes narradoras francesas del momento.

• Delphine de Vigan habla de Las lealtades con Silvia Ayuso en S Moda
• Entrevista con De Vigan, de Anatxu Zabalbeascoa en EL PAÍS SEMANAL
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Revancha no es otra novela más de Barcelona. Es una novela excepcional de otra Barcelona: la de la periferia o el extrarradio —de La Mina y Sant Adrià a las poblaciones del Baix Llobregat—, donde se alojan y recluyen los expulsados de BAR-CEL-ONA, la millor botiga del món. Kiko Amat construye Revancha en torno a dos personajes protagónicos —Amador y César—, cuyas vidas acabarán cruzándose.

• Crítica de Ana Rodríguez Fischer
• Entrevista con Kiko Amat, de Miquel Echarri
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

“Caen las hojas... / ¿Vosotros también tenéis estaciones? / Son más hermosas cuando caen / Que en el árbol. / Se iluminan / Cuando la muerte se enciende en ellas / Como en la llama de una vela / Una catedral”. El vosotros del segundo verso se refiere a los muertos que acompañan en el más allá al marido de Ana Blandiana, al que la poeta rumana le dedica una larga elegía en la que alternan el drama y la chispa. A grandes temas, grandes poemas.

• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Animal de bosque nos presenta a un individuo “misteriosamente feliz”. En efecto, resultan admirables la serenidad expresiva y la altivez estoica con las que un veterano de derrotas vitales afronta la prospección de la propia muerte. El autor que hace 20 años entonó un estremecedor réquiem por su hija Joana nos habla aquí sin tapujos de la enfermedad, pero sortea hábilmente la tentación del patetismo autocompasivo. Y es que el balance de Animal de bosque está recorrido por una soterrada celebración de la existencia, en la que se dan cita conquistas momentáneas y cicatrices duraderas.

• Crítica de Luis Bagué Quílez
• Entrevista con Joan Margarit, de Jesús Ruiz Mantilla
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

En 2013, Anna Wiener decidió sumarse a la caravana de presuntos triunfadores y se instaló en el San Francisco de la pasada década, al calor de una oferta laboral de una start-up de libros. El salto salarial de Wiener, que con 25 años pasó de cobrar 30.000 dólares anuales (24.500 euros) en la editorial a triplicar su sueldo en Silicon Valley, exigía como contrapartida una homérica travesía desde el mundo laboral e industrial del siglo XX a la exuberante y a menudo irracional cultura del ecosistema tecnológico californiano. La autora de Valle inquietante nos narra esta odisea profesional y personal en un maravilloso relato en el que se alternan la voz dolorida de Joan Didion y ecos escatológicos del Ignatius J. Reilly de La conjura de los necios.

• Critica de Borja Bergareche
• Entrevista con Anne Wiener, de Luis Pablo de Beauregard
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Noche fiel y virtuosa, publicado originalmente en 2014 y el primer libro de Louise Glück traducido al castellano tras ganar el Premio Nobel, es, en definitiva, un gran libro de una gran poeta, no de las más cacareadas en los ambientes de moda, como dejó bien claro Patti Smith: “¿Louise Glück?”, le preguntaron cuando el Nobel. “No he leído una sola línea suya”. Solo le faltó decir: “No sé quién es”.

• Crítica de Ángel Rupérez
• Artículo de Javier Rodríguez Marcos tras la concesión del Nobel a Louise Glück (8/10/2020)
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Hervaciana es un libro unitario, aunque los capítulos que lo conforman funcionen como relatos autónomos. El propósito, el tono y la atmosfera son los de un texto compacto, con un propósito de libro de formación. La escritura de Gonzalo Hidalgo Bayal en este soberbio volumen tiene ecos cervantinos y borgianos. Por la ironía pactada con la ternura, la exactitud flaubertiana de los vocablos y, sobre todo, por la infinitud de los gestos y comportamientos psicológicos retratados.

• Crítica de J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Autora de libros escandalosos como Despojos, en el que relató su terrible divorcio, y de la exitosa trilogía que inició A contraluz, casi un atentado terrorista a la ficción más tradicional y flácida, el nuevo título de Rachel Cusk, Segunda casa (Libros del Asteroide), cuento moral sobre una mujer que duda entre un hombre bueno y otro malo, supone un regreso inesperado a un género en el que había dejado de creer: la ficción.

• Entrevista con Rachel Cusk, de Àlex Vicente
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

La angustiosa historia que relata Anna Starobinets, la reina rusa del terror, en Tienes que mirar no está en su cabeza. Es su vida. La descriptiva, conmovedora y angustiosa memoria de una mujer que acude a una ecografía rutinaria y recibe la noticia de que el hijo que espera tiene una anomalía congénita grave. Que no sobrevivirá. El relato de horror de una mujer que choca contra la pared del rígido engranaje de salud ruso y tiene que viajar a Alemania para abortar.

• Entrevista con Anna Starobinets, de María R. Sahuquillo
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Natassja Martin, doctora en antropología, de 35 años, tenía 29 cuando, mientras realizaba trabajo de campo en la península de Kamchatka, la atacó un oso que probablemente la hubiera matado de no defenderse ella con un piolet. El plantígrado se marchó con un trozo de mandíbula y tres dientes de la antropóloga, causándole grandes heridas en el rostro y la cabeza, además de otra en la pierna. A partir de semejante ordalía, Martin ha escrito un libro hermosísimo, hipnótico y conmovedor, de un extraño lirismo, sobre la relación de los seres humanos y los animales y sobre la práctica de la antropología, Creer en las fieras.

• Artículo de Jacinto Antón sobre Creer en las fieras
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

El secreto de la fuerza sobrehumana, de Alison Bechdel, son unas memorias en las que repasa su vida a través de la obsesión por el ejercicio. En el prólogo, la autora del exitoso Fun Home, de 61 años, admite que se ha apuntado “a casi todas las modas del fitness de las últimas seis décadas”. Los motivos: la fijación por los músculos y el hechizo de la fuerza bruta. Pero sobre todo porque, como reconoce, “cuando te estás machacando dejas de pensar sobre lo que estás haciendo. Lo haces, y punto”.

• Entrevista con Alison Bechdel, de Iker Seisdedos
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Durante años, Carmen Maria Machado trató de relatar su historia a gente que no sabía escucharla. Por eso acabó escribiendo un libro, En la casa de los sueños, que describe su traumática relación con la mujer que la maltrató al final de su veintena. Su libro aborda un tabú: el de los casos de abuso que se producen dentro de las relaciones lésbicas. Su historia empieza como una comedia romántica LGTB+, pero ese romance idílico no tardará en convertirse en un cuento de horror doméstico.

• Entrevista de Carmen María Machado, de Àlex Vicente
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Jonathan Franzen acapara como nadie la atención de los medios con solo anunciar la aparición de una nueva novela suya. Meses antes de su publicación, Encrucijadas había despertado una expectación pocas veces vista en los círculos literarios dentro y fuera de Estados Unidos. Cuando por fin llegaron las críticas, el consenso ha sido unánime. Encrucijadas es una novela excelente, la mejor de Franzen.

• Entrevista con Jonathan Franzen, de Eduardo Lago
• Lea las primeras páginas de Encrucijadas
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

M. El hombre de la providencia, segunda entrega de la megalómana y celebrada “novela documental” de Antoio Scurati, es una obra hipnótica, pero seguramente retrata con mayor fidelidad la figura de Benito Mussolini que los trabajos de Andrew Roberts sobre Churchill, de Joachim Fest sobre Hitler o de Giorgio Pini en su biografía del Duce de 1926. Seguro que D’Annunzio se hubiese apresurado a asegurar que M es el testimonio incontestable de que “todo hombre alimenta un desenfrenado deseo de placer y de egoísmo”.

• Crítica de Javier Aparicio Maydeu
• Entrevista con Antono Scurati, de Daniel Verdú
• Lea un fragmento de M. El hombre de la providencia
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

A la poeta y ensayista Anne Boyer, que se alzó con el Pulitzer de no ficción en 2020, le había ido la vida, en más de un sentido, con ese libro premiado, Desmorir (Sexto Piso), un ensayo en el que abordó el agresivo cáncer de mama que padeció. En esas páginas construyó una historia literaria, cultural y social de la enfermedad, resistiendo con conmovedora fuerza “el miedo a convertir el dolor en un producto”.

• Entrevista con Anne Boyer, de Andrea Aguilar
• Columna de Leila Guerriero
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Antes de ser el novelista más importante de su generación y una de las figuras más premiadas de la narrativa europea, Mircea Cărtărescu (Bucarest, 1956) escribió poesía compulsivamente. Admirador de la generación beat, de Bob Dylan y los Beatles, sus poemas fueron considerados subversivos por la dictadura de Ceausescu. Muchos poemas parecen letras para una música no escrita, melodías con un “aire con diamantes”. Entretejiendo el realismo y el sueño, la memoria y el mito, la ironía y la parábola, la épica y la lírica, su poesía brilla en la ausencia de límites.

• Crítica de Antonio Ortega
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Wagnerismo cuenta la historia de la “influencia más grande que un compositor haya tenido nunca más allá de la música”. “Los hay más escuchados y los hay más populares, pero nada es comparable a Wagner, salvo quizá los Beatles o Dylan en los sesenta. No hay un bachismo, ni un beethovenismo, y sí un wagnerismo como fenómeno cultural autónomo”, como explica el crítico musical de The New Yorker, Alex Ross, también autor de El ruido eterno (2009), fenomenal superventas, también en España, sobre la música del siglo XX.

• Entrevista con Alex Ross, de Iker Seisdedos
• Artículo de Chris Walton
• Lea un fragmento de Wagnerismo
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Sergio Ramírez es uno de los referentes literarios, morales y políticos de la literatura en español desde hace ya décadas. Y Tongolele no sabía bailar es un pedazo de novela. Y lo seguirá siendo porque en ella no hay nada coyuntural —a pesar de lo que relata en ella, el levantamiento de 2018 en Nicaragua y la sangrienta represión que se cobró 427 muertes, la mayoría estudiantes— sino esencial. La denuncia de la corrupción, de la brutalidad, del miedo de la víctima pero también de los verdugos, el juego infantil, cruel, ridículo y paranoico del poder y su aquelarre de horror.

• Crítica de Carlos Zanón
• Entrevista con Sergio Ramírez, de Javier Lafuente
• Tribuna de Sergio Ramírez
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Sigrid Nunez, autora respetada pero con una trayectoria algo discreta, se vio propulsada por el éxito de su libro anterior, El amigo, sobre la insospechada amistad entre una escritora solitaria y un perro, con el que ganó el prestigioso National Book Award en 2018. De repente, Nunez dejó de ser el secreto mejor guardado de las letras estadounidenses. Su último título, Cuál es tu tormento, es una falsa autoficción sobre la empatía y el dolor de los demás, en la que retoma ciertas tesis de su primera mentora, Susan Sontag.

• Entrevista con Sigrid Nunez, de Àlex Vicente
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Estamos ante una novela epistolar, compuesta solo de dos misivas larguísimas que no reciben respuesta alguna. Son cartas que, contrariamente a lo habitual en este género, aparecen sin ningún anclaje en la realidad exterior ni explicación alguna dada por un editor ficticio. Nada sabemos de los receptores sino aquello que ronda por la cabeza de Luis, el que piensa y escribe todo lo que leemos. A través de las misivas, Jacobo Bergareche reflexiona sobre el amor y sus debilidades, el fracaso final.

• Crítica de Lluís Satorras
• Tribuna de Mario Vargas Llosa
• Entrevista con Jacobo Bergareche, de Tom C. Avendaño
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

En Calle Este-Oeste (2017), Philippe Sands destapaba el secreto de sus abuelos, que escaparon de los nazis a París. El libro era una memoria familiar, un ensayo histórico y un tratado sobre el derecho internacional criminal, la especialidad profesional del autor. Este año Sands ha publicado Ruta de escape, el trepidante relato de la huida de Otto von Wächter, oficial de las SS. Una obra llena de giros inesperados que bebe de la novela de espías y contiene una desasosegante reflexión sobre el mal.

• Artículo de Marc Bassets
• Columna de Javier Rodríguez Marcos
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Rechazado por más de 20 sellos, finalmente Bluets, este bello y breve ensayo, construido a partir de 240 anotaciones o divagaciones en torno a la obsesión de la autora con el color azul, fue publicado en Estados Unidos en 2009. Convertido en libro de culto, ahora llega su versión en castellano. Mallarmé, Goethe o el recuerdo de una tarde de sexo en el Chelsea Hotel se van a sumando a Emerson, Yves Klein o Billie Holiday, en un texto que se mueve como una conversación entre la poesía, el comentario ilustrado, la crítica cultural y la autobiografía.

• Entrevista con Maggie Nelson, de Andrea Aguilar
• Enlace de la editorial

El primer acierto de Los abismos, último premio Alfaguara de novela, es la perspectiva sutil, casi asordinada, con que refleja la fuerte violencia estructural de una sociedad machista. Frente al imperativo, tan de época, de que la literatura señale claramente sus intenciones, Pilar Quintana apuesta por un tono amable, casi naíf, que no obstante arrincona y carga de dolor la mirada de la narradora, Claudia, una niña de ocho años.

• Crítica de Carlos Pardo
• Entrevista con Pilar Quintana, de Juan Cruz
• Lea las primeras páginas de Los abismos
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Los lectores de La fragilidad alcanzarán la unanimidad del jurado que le otorgó el XXXIII Premio Loewe de Poesía por su abrumadora madurez vital y su soberbia capacidad expresiva, por enunciar una “teoría de la vida” desde la enfermedad, el dolor y la muerte. Fruto de un intenso proceso de depuración emocional, estos poemas asumen un habla tan viva como poética, sin artificios ni ficciones, lejos de la mediocridad sentimental para dar voz al caos, a la resolución final de una pérdida irrecuperable.

• Crítica de Antonio Ortega
• Diego Doncel. En Pocas Palabras
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

De una forma involuntaria a la hora de escribirlas, pero con una dimensión conjunta cuando se contemplan reunidas en un mismo volumen, las misivas que componen Escribir en el agua. Cartas (1930-1992) conforman una autobiografía del compositor estadounidense desde que tenía apenas 18 años hasta el año de su fallecimiento. Además de ser un itinerario comentado a través de las obras del autor, el lector encuentra en el libro interesantes debates e intercambios culturales con figuras como Morton Feldman, Merce Cunningham, Pierre Boulez, Peter Yates, Marshall McLuhan, Christian Wolff y David Tudor.

• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Ursula Kuczynski, alias Ruth Werner, alias Agente Sonya fue una oficial del Ejército Rojo, experta en comunicación por radio, saboteadora, espía de primer nivel y escritora de gran éxito. “Su trabajo era letal. Si fracasaba, moriría y su familia también. Tenía una gran capacidad para compartimentar, algo que hacen los buenos espías, pero reconocía que si hubiera llegado a un conflicto entre su familia y la revolución ella habría elegido la revolución. En muchos aspectos era una fanática comunista”, afirma el historiador Ben Macintyre, que acaba de publicar en España Agente Sonya.

• Artículo de Juan Carlos Galindo
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

Para comenzar a trinchar el vasto universo personal de Hebe Uhart, se puede empezar por El amor es una cosa extraña, que recopila tres novelas cortas inéditas tituladas Beni, Leonilda y El tren que nos lleva. En ellas está presente su universo característico: el ambiente de las pequeñas localidades de distintas regiones de Argentina que ella recrea con particular encanto, el dilema de elegir entre la vida del campo o la de la ciudad, o la reproducción de voces de personajes de diversa procedencia sociocultural, ya sea el portero de un edificio, una migrante de la región argentina de El Chaco que se muda a Buenos Aires o la maestra de una escuela rural.

• Artículo de Mercedes Cebrián
• Enlace del libro en la editorial

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