Books for the summer: 80 novelties recommended for these holidays

TRIPS

By Jacinto Anton

Pete Fromm - Translation by Carmen Torres and Laura Naranjo - Errata Naturae, 2022. 352 pages.

21 euros

Pete Fromm is the guy who at the age of 20, in love with reading about tough mountain men, went to spend a lonely winter in a wild place in Idaho.

Upon his return he wrote

, a cult work.

He now returns, 25 years later, to live a similar adventure in Montana.

He is already a father, he has two children, and part of the initial morbidity is to see if he is brainless enough to take them: he doesn't, which is lucky because grizzly bears stalk him

it's freezing cold and he has a hard time.

He takes advantage, yes, to make moccasins for the children.

The thing has a strange charm.

Gabi Martínez - GeoPlaneta, 2022. 272 ​​pages.

€21.90

Our most conspicuous

traveler embarks on a strenuous journey through Spain in search of emblematic wild animals, seeking a new way of telling our fauna that combines the passion of a Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente with modern environmental sensitivity.

The trail takes you to the lizard of the island of Hierro, the Basque whale, the capercaillie in Asturias, the memory of the extinct bucardo or the lynx.

A wonderful journey, full of encounters with extraordinary beings, and not all of them with hair or feathers.

William Dalrymple - Translation by Victoria Eugenia Gordo del Rey - Deserta Ferro, 2022. 608 pages.

€27.95

Dalrymple, one of the best travel writers of his generation, has long been writing Indian history with an extraordinary narrative pulse.

In this book he takes us on a journey, after traveling himself to the National Archives of India and finding unpublished documents, to the times of the great uprising that began with the Sepoy mutiny in 1857 and changed the destiny of the subcontinent.

Decisive in the famous mutiny was the last Mughal emperor Shah Zafar II, a descendant of Tamerlane.

It seems that we are there.

NARRATIVE IN SPANISH

By Domingo Rodenas de Moya

Juan Gómez Bárcena - Seix Barral, 2022. 544 pages.

€21.90

This is the story of a place, the Cantabrian town of Toñanes, narrated jumping between all times and between a multitude of characters.

An improbable story that Gómez Bárcena has made a reality with colossal literary arrests and a bold narrative elaboration that makes fears and desires, birth and death, love and oblivion the real protagonists.

A novel made up of discontinuities that manages to convey the essential —and fragile— temporality of our condition.

Laura Restrepo - Alfaguara, 2022. 400 pages.

€17.95

Myth and chronicle, magical thought and science, biblical echoes and humanitarian emergency come together in a novel about the resilience of women from the ancient kingdom of Saba (Yemen, Ethiopia and Eritrea) and about the eternal fire of lovers.

The East invented by Westerners crumbles before the lacerating reality of the migrants in the refugee camps.

It impresses, distresses, exalts and moves to reflection that in the midst of the maximum deprivation, hope and beauty subsist.

Elena Poniatowska - Seix Barral, 2022. 904 pages.

€24.90

The first volume of a river novel in which the Mexican Cervantes Prize winner goes back to her roots in 18th-century Poland to tell the story of her ancestor Stanilaw Poniatowski, the last Polish king and lover of Empress Catherine the Great.

In parallel, the writer evokes her arrival in Mexico as a child and her passionate and afflictive initiation into the literary world.

The juxtaposition of times and spaces create a narrative with a double background, that of lived memory and that of learned memory.

Lucía Lijtmaer - Anagrama, 2022. 222 pages.

€18.90

Two women separated for four hundred years, one in 17th-century America, the other in today's Barcelona, ​​one dead and the other submerged in depression, alternate in a double story of uprooting that drifts towards an unexpected final convergence.

The betrayal of love and its healing, the inveterate machismo and the imperative of resistance cross the ages in a kind of transhistoric sorority.

A very well crafted, intelligently written novel about pain and oppression.

Juan Miñana - Cathedral, 2022. 336 pages.

20 euros

The erratic existence of a blurred Catalan poet, Xavier Viura, Wagnerian, libertarian, naturist, essentially a poor devil, serves as a pretext to recount Barcelona from the twenties to the forties, in a continuous swarm of characters (among them the anarchist minister Federica Montseny or the promoter of naturism Nicolás Capo) orchestrated with a masterful hand and transparent prose.

A classic historical novel that breathes life into an archaeological Barcelona and projects us back into its ephemeral splendors and its lasting grisaille.

Rafael Reig - Tusquets, 2022. 256 pages.

18 euros

For once, Reig becomes serious to speak from the serenity and ease of the old narrator of living when there is hardly any life left.

Admitted to a residence while the pandemic progresses, he reads and drinks as he has done since he was young and sieves past and present, remembers and meditates while writing a confession for his son Gonzalo.

The portrait of old age moves without pathos and leaves room for the buzzing Reig to resurface with relief.

Rafael Cansinos Assens - Ediciones Arca, 2022. 864 pages.

€34.20

The meeting in a single volume of the three volumes of memories of Rafael Cansinos Assens (they had been published in three volumes between 1982 and 1995) allows us to return to an essential memorial work of the past century.

From the end of the century to the Civil War, Cansinos is gearing a living and at times evil chronicle of the literary world, an anthill of vanity and insufficiency.

The distance brings disappointment and humor and the writing of Cansinos, which had been gobbled up, runs here clean and vigorous.

TRANSLATED NARRATIVE

By Jose Maria Guelbenzu

Rebecca West - Translation by Andrés Barba Muñiz - Seix Barral, 2022. 160 pages.

18 euros

Novelist, journalist, traveler, essayist... Rebecca West did it all well thanks to an unusual talent.

The novel contains a wonderful analysis of feelings through the incredible truth of an old youthful love awakened under the psychological effects of the war that conditions his family.

A fascinating and impossible love story that only a noble and generous heart will be able to understand.

Told by a brilliantly chosen narrator voice.

- Translation by Catalina Martínez Muñoz - Alba Editorial, 2022. 464 pages.

€24.50

Naturally, the classic English family story gathered around the summer could not be missing.

Forty-five years later, gathered at a funeral, the characters remember that summer of 1939 whose lives would be changed by World War II and everything that followed.

Mary Wesley wrote this heart-pounding story at the age of seventy, which cost her family to stop talking to her, but she kept writing and her novels have sold hundreds of thousands.

Georges Simenon - Translations by Núria Petit and Caridad Martínez - Anagram / Cliff, 2021. 192, 176 and 168 pages.

€14.90

Simenon is a unique and brilliant storyteller whose world grips the reader hopelessly and utterly abducts him.

A very direct and unadorned style, but with a fascinating precision.

He wrote more than 190 novels, to the happiness of his readers and rejection of snobs.

A born storyteller, with a recognizable and unique world, a literary personality that catches hopelessly.

Two prestigious publishers have come together to publish it.

Do not miss this opportunity.

In addition to the aforementioned title, there are two more (

so that your reading lasts a month.

Isaac Bashevis Singer - Translation of Jacob Abecasís and Ronda Henelde - Cliff, 2022. 336 pages.

22 euros

Singer —Nobel Prize winner in 1978—, author of high dramatic temperament, superb narrator, surprises with this story of a mischievous Jew emigrated to the United States, where he seeks life while having erotic relationships with every woman who comes within his reach, from the wife of his protector to the assistant of a medium.

But this time, the drama is tinged with a very clever humor.

Singer becomes the author of an authentic sitcom with a succession of characters each more fun, human and endearing.

A. G. MacDonnell - Translation by Pablo González-Nuevo - Siruela, 2022. 304 pages.

€19.95

A detective from the golden age of the Crime and Mystery genre that, however, seems to have been written by a current author.

This apparent contradiction is due to the fact that MacDonnell does not throw himself into the arms of the classic intelligent Poirot detective, but instead makes us follow the police routine of a Scotland Yard inspector and his boss, ordinary policemen who spend the novel without finding no clue to help them, but the author's talent turns this patient investigation into a gripping story.

Stéphan Lévy-Kuentz - Translation by Laura Naranjo Gutiérrez - Peripheral, 2022. 136 pages.

10 euros

From the very title you can see how suitable this book is for a summer full of snacks.

It is the story of a guy who sits on the terrace of a bar and lets time pass pleasantly abandoned to the pleasure of a drink or two before lunch and meditates pleasantly while letting time pass.

This book is the flow of an awareness of our time made by a cultured observer, possessor of a sensitive sense of humor.

Tim Gautreaux - Translation by José Gabriel Rodríguez Pazos - La Huerta Grande, 2022. 416 pages.

22 euros

Gautreaux is, today, the greatest of the American southern novelists.

This novel takes place in a sawmill in Louisiana among swamps, alligators, snakes, mud and heat where you work under grueling conditions and a Sicilian mafia.

Two brothers, sons of a logging empire, have to face each other there to solve a difficult relationship between them;

but in the fraternal confrontation two exceptional characters rise: his two wives.

A powerful story about love and family.

INTERNATIONAL POLICY

By Andrea Rizzi

Catherine Belton - Translation by Juanjo Estrella González - Peninsula, 2022. 928 pages.

€27.90

The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has precipitated the biggest upheaval of the world order in decades.

, by Catherine Belton, a journalist with a notable professional career in Russia, sheds much light on the process of conquest and consolidation of power by the leader responsible for the brutal geopolitical upheaval.

The work, built on a meticulous documentary research and interviews, allows a deep understanding of one of the key people of our time and the group of former KGB leaders who have helped him.

Moisés Naím - Translation by María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia - Debate, 2022. 376 pages.

€20.81

The 21st century poses a new set of challenges to liberal democracies.

Added to the external challenges, with the rise and aggressiveness of some authoritarian regimes, are the internal ones, which Moisés Naím —former executive director of the World Bank and columnist for this newspaper— crystallizes in the message of the 3 Ps: populism, polarization and post-truth.

explores how these tools have been used and proposes measures to counteract them.

As a whole, the book builds a portrait of the moment of liberal democracies and a useful tool to interpret their near future.

Jorge Dezcallar - The Sphere of Books, 2022. 360 pages.

€20.90

While the war in Ukraine and its consequences monopolize the attention of public opinion, many other crises shake the planet.

Embracing the world, by Jorge Dezcallar —former director of the CNI and former Spanish ambassador to the US— maps and doesactically analyzes a wide range of those conflicts or sociopolitical dynamics that define our time.

The growing global interconnection, a source of opportunity and risk, gives a special value to the periscopic review of this work.

NATIONAL POLITICS

By Jordi Amat

José Luis Villacañas Berlanga - Harper Collins, 2022, 504 pages.

€22.90

The rethinking of the orthodox account of the Transition had committed an excessive ideologization, as if its only dimension were political.

This superb essay by Villacañas disrupts the coordinates because it places in the center what were the conditions for the construction of capitalism in Spain.

To begin with, the liquidation of the republican project by a war entrepreneur like Franco and, destroying any democratic alternative, consolidating a passive revolution by technocratic elites who have not stopped ruling.

Arturo Muñoz - Pumpkin Seeds, 2022. 296 pages.

€21.90

The memory of terrorist violence continues to weigh on our society.

How to judge it?

They are moral challenges that can be explored through testimony.

This is the challenge that Arturo Muñoz proposes: he interviews over and over again a civil guard who arrived poor at a poor barracks in the Basque Country and, suddenly, found himself in the heart of the conflict.

The author is left without absolute truths because he has the courage to try to understand what the change of time makes indecipherable.

Manel Pérez - Peninsula, 2022. 288 pages.

€18.90

Some 850 books have been published on the Procés.

Few are as clarifying as this one by journalist Manel Pérez because the place from which he thinks about the political crisis is the economy.

On the one hand, he demystifies a bourgeoisie that, protected by his myth, lost influence due to an inadvertent deindustrialization dynamic during the first decade of the 21st century.

On the other, it confirms a disempowerment that tried to be reversed through a political commitment led by Mas and that they did not have the strength to channel.

Begoña Gómez Urzaiz - Destino, 2022. 320 pages.

18.90

The change in sensitivity forces us to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions about the relationship of the individual with his society.

Questions about traditional roles that seemed immutable, but that evolve and thus question us about equality.

Questions about motherhood, for example, about to what extent it can limit the development of a life project and the consequences of assuming it or not.

The women who rebelled against it, abandoning their children, are the protagonists of this magnificent essay.

SPORT

By Pedro Zuazúa

Guillaume Martin Platoon Society - Translation by Marcos Pereda - Road Books, 2022. 144 pages.

€21.90

Guillaume Martin, cyclist and writer, had a phrase come to mind while training in the Sierra Nevada: "The peloton is made up of solitary beings who don't know how to do anything but live together."

He had already been exercising for six hours, so only what was strictly necessary reached his brain.

He identified this idea as the basis for the first chapter of his new book

(Route Books), in which he develops an interesting reflection on sport, the human being, the individual and the collective.

Valerio Curcio - Translation by Ernesto C. Gardiner - Altamarea, 2022. 160 pages.

€18.90

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a great football fan.

He is also a notable left winger.

He was the founder of a club that dreamed of financing itself based on cultural and training activities.

In his time as a high school teacher, he organized games in which he divided the students into failing versus passing teams.

They say that, of the few times that he was seen angry, it was because of some defeat of his Bologna.

In

(Altamarea), Valerio Curcio invites readers on a journey through the close relationship between the artist and football.

HISTORY

By Guillermo Altares

Mary Beard - Translation by Miguel Ángel Pérez Pérez - Alianza Editorial, 380 pages.

€22.95

Mary Beard has become the best-known —and most widely read— scholar of the classical world for her enormous capacity to divulge, but also for her intelligence in finding different points of view to explain the past.

In this book she shows us what unites us and, at the same time, separates us from ancient Rome through humor.

The conclusion is challenging: we can still find funny jokes that were told 2,000 years ago.

Jody Rosen - Translation by Valentín Farrés - Editorial Indicios, 2022. 470 pages.

€18.05

The bicycle has been one of the great inventions in history.

In this surprising and funny essay, journalist Jody Rosen looks at what the bicycle—which began circulating in 1817—has done for us.

And he does it in a way that is often counterintuitive, because it was not only a vehicle of freedom and emancipation, but also a powerful instrument of colonization.

And, of course, it is a pileup with both a past and a future.

Cristina Oñoro - Taurus, 2022. 577 pages.

€20.90

Through 13 profiles, the Complutense professor Cristina Oñoro reveals a side of history that has often been hidden: that of women.

From prehistory to the 21st century, this book with agile and precise writing reviews the lives of essential characters, such as Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, Malinche or Simone Weil, and through them offers a new point of view on a story that only we thought we knew.

Cédric Gras - Translation by Palmira Freixas - Review, 2022. 231 pages.

€18.90

Can the history of the Soviet Union be told through the story of two brothers, Vitali and Yevgueni Abalákov, who were the most famous climbers of their time, overwhelmed by the mountain, but also by Stalinist terror?

Cédric Gras achieves this in an essay that goes far beyond the peaks of the Caucasus to become a reflection on totalitarianism and its desire to occupy every space in the lives of those who suffer from it.

SCIENCE

By Javier Salas

María Martinón-Torres - Destino, 2022. 272 ​​pages.

€18.90

There is an ancestral beauty in the disclosure made by María Martinón-Torres in

.

At the same time that she tells how we sapiens became social, story material, in those narratives by the light of the bonfire, she herself relies on literary metaphors to help us understand the most complex inquiries about human life.

Martinón-Torres, director of the National Center for Research on Human Evolution, takes advantage of her knowledge of medicine and paleoanthropology to explain to us why human imperfections made our species triumph.

James Poskett - Translation by Pedro Pacheco González - Review, 2022. 512 pages.

€24.90

The historian James Poskett has focused his research on the origins of science, but not on Copernicus and Newton, but on everything that happened in the geographical margins of what we know from the usual manuals.

From Oaxtepec to Beijing, from Istanbul to Timbuktu, from Varanasi to Tahiti, far from the Eurocentric axis, Poskett locates and vindicates in

everything they did and contributed to other continents and cultures, sometimes appropriated through colonization and conquest by our empires.

Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman - Translation by Damián Alou - Anagrama, 2022. 368 pages.

€20.90

The four-handed work of a composer (Brandt) and a neuroscientist (Eagleman) perfectly sums up the plot line of the book: to explain from art and brain research how human creativity works.

Or why the same mental mechanisms were activated when Picasso painted

and when NASA engineers saved the astronauts of Apollo 13. Loaded with references, examples and useful reflections, it is highly recommended reading.

THEATER

By Raquel Vidales

Alfredo Sanzol - Ediciones Antígona, 2021. 220 pages.

18 euros

The play that has received the most awards in the last year is one of those that are enjoyed not only on stage, but also as a reading.

It is a linear story in the form of a comedy starring a Navarrese priest (inspired by the author's father) who decides to leave the priesthood to try his fortune in the United States, which will lead him to experience a lot of adventures and meet a lot of colorful characters .

It was published by the Centro Dramático Nacional after its premiere in February 2021 and shortly after it was reissued by the Antígona label.

Esther F. Carrodeguas Supernormales - National Drama Center, 2021. Spanish-Galician bilingual edition.

144 pages.

10 euros

Theatrical director Iñaki Ricarte wrote this in the playbill for his staging of

when it premiered last March at the Centro Dramático Nacional

“An overwhelming, very direct text that breaks taboos with cannon fire and leaves no puppet with a head” .

It is.

Esther F. Carrodeguas questions prejudices and political correctness in this play starring actors with and without disabilities who talk about sex with humor and without hesitation.

The author's ability to oppose arguments in those conversations, convince us of something and later dismantle it in seconds is admirable.

THOUGHT

By Máriam Martínez Bascuñán

Minouche Shafik - Translation by Albino Santos Mosquera - Paidós, 2022. 320 pages.

22 euros

Este podría ser un libro del popular filósofo norteamericano Michael Sandel, pero está escrito por una economista. La autora de origen egipcio, Minouche Shafik, nos anticipa en el mismo título que el centro de gravedad de su reflexión es la interdependencia. La actual directora de la London School of Economics nos brinda esta magistral reflexión motivada por el impacto de la crisis climática y de la pandemia mundial con datos recogidos por todo el mundo para esbozar las claves del nuevo contrato social. Shafik utiliza el viejo recurso teórico político del pacto para hablarnos de ámbitos como la igualdad de género, la educación, la sanidad, la empresa privada o el trabajo, desde un nivel riguroso y reflexivo que compite bien con el de grandes pensadores como Sandel o el mismísimo Amartya Sen.

Martha C. Nussbaum - Translation by Albino Santos Mosquera - Paidós, 2022. 392 pages.

22 euros

En línea con la cuarta ola feminista, Nussbaum nos aclara en este libro por qué el acoso sexual es un fenómeno que se explica antes por el poder que por el sexo. Confieso que esperaba ansiosa una reflexión rigurosa y profunda sobre el #MeToo de una de mis principales referentes filosóficos y en un momento de profunda contestación del movimiento. El sugerente título alude a esas burbujas en las que hombres influyentes pueden aislarse aún de la completa imputación de responsabilidades porque acaparan la cúspide de poder de ámbitos como el judicial, las artes y los deportes. Estas son las tres ciudadelas atravesadas por la soberbia: el vicio que provoca la negación de tratar a las mujeres desde el respeto igualitario, como ocurre con la superioridad racial o el desprecio clasista. Lean a Nussbaum y además de entender qué es lo que sostiene esa cultura del poder masculino descubrirán una vía humanista para su superación.

Byung-Chul Han - Translation by Joaquín Chamorro Mielke - Taurus, 2022. 112 pages.

€13.20

Aunque sus libros ya parecen fascículos sobre el mismo tema —la democracia y los nuevos mecanismos de dominación— lo cierto es que la originalidad de la escritura minimalista de Byung-Chul Han, consigue que siempre acabes enganchado a su lectura. Siguiendo una metodología aristotélica, infocracia podría ser el modo en el que se pervierte la democracia cuando la digitalización se convierte en una forma total de estar y de relacionarnos con el mundo, afectando incluso a los sistemas políticos. El salto de la acción comunicativa al mundo digitalizado es un tema que muchos estamos esperando en el propio Jürgen Habermas, aunque ocupe una parte importante de este libro. Han tiene hallazgos que son más fáciles de rumiar en la playa.

Edith Hall - Translation of Daniel Najmías - Anagram, 2022. 312 pages.

€19.90

Turning Aristotle into a kind of self-help manual is a powerful reason to read a book that also comes with the seal of quality of its author, the British classicist Edith Hall.

The claim that the works of philosophers 1,000 or 2,000 years ago are useful today would be a cliché were it not true.

This is a delightful piece of work that does justice to the importance of Aristotle not only to our civilization, but to our individual happiness.

The author manages to present her ethics in current language so that we can appreciate the richness of her thought and its usefulness for practical challenges in our daily lives.

ART

By Angela Molina

Janis Tomlinson - Translation by José Pablo Barragán - Chair, 2022. 544 pages.

€34.95

Where a retrospective is not enough, a monograph arrives.

The difficulty of covering all of Goya is also the fluidity achieved in this personal portrait of the first modernist (proto-romantic, proto-Marxist), who wrote about a drawing from his

of 1826 “I still learn”, a sign of the indecipherable power of humility .

Now that the world is reeling, the lessons from this documented and entertaining biography of Tomlinson indicate that the signs of art were already there as signs of the traumas to come.

William Deresiewicz - Translation by Mercedes Vaquero - Captain Swing, 2022. 448 pages.

22 euros

Van Gogh's ear is not the name of a musical group but the symptom of the general depression in the art world.

But it is not the hunger of the artist, but rather his death, which William Deresiewicz points to as triggering the new technologies, with their "monopsony" (the market in which there is a single buyer, like Amazon), and current consumption habits , which include piracy.

Is a resurrection possible?

The key is to move from “everyone is an artist” to “don't complain, get organized”.

Graciela Speranza - Anagrama, 2022. 190 pages.

€18.90

It was precisely in

where the Argentine writer found the reason to undertake her essay, because although this

can become independent from Goya's work as a whole, its almost abstract ambiguity represents veiled threats of our time, a new Dark Age in which vision has become paradoxically blind.

The strength of the dog nestles in what cannot be seen, as occurs in Klee's paintings, Hito Steyerl's videos or Fernández Mallo's writing.

For Speranza, the artist is the only one who can look at things again.

ARCHITECTURE

By Anatxu Zabalbeascoa

Marco Martella - Translation by Natalia Zarco - Elba, 2022. 152 pages.

21 euros

Martella or any of his heteronyms (Jorn de Précy or Teodor Ceric) speak of nature and culture as if they were the same thing: the fullest way of being in the world.

Here each character is summed up in a flower.

The landscape gardener Gilles Clément —who seems at one with his garden— is the parsley that grows giant.

And Emily Dikinson —who stopped going out because she had a garden—, a bouquet of pansies, “the humblest flower that exists”, which she holds in the best-known photograph of her.

The most beautiful gardens serve to make us accept the unacceptable.

Llàtzer Moix - Anagram, 2022. 544 pages.

€24.90

After analyzing the architecture-spectacle and the Calatrava phenomenon, the legendary head of culture at

makes 23 Pritzker speak.

He considers the evolution of the award “from followers to leaders”.

And it gathers interviews, almost all of them unpublished, where Gehry talks about micro-creativity.

He hails from the cosmopolitan Portugal of the thirties.

Mendes da Rocha of Niemeyer's mug using the curves of women.

Moneo recalls an authoritarian father, Sejima defends strong ideas against new ones, and Carme Pigem declares that RCR wants to fly.

CINEMA

By Elsa Fernandez-Santos

Paulino Viota - Athenaica-Gong Series, 2022. 256 pages.

20 euros

Paulino Viota notices it:

(Athenaica-Gong Series) is unreadable without having the movies in front of you or knowing them by heart.

Something that should not be a problem in the face of the undeniable classics, from

to

, in which the filmmaker and theoretician from Santander dives into in his new book.

Viota delves into Ford's narrative structure to analyze the scaffolding on which his films are supported through a book that functions as "a playbill, as is done in operas, a little disproportionate and delirious".

Núria Bou and Xavier Pérez - Chair, 2022. 352 pages.

€22.50

Sara Montiel, Teresa Gimpera, Aurora Bautista, Emma Penella, Analía Gadé, Lola Flores or Helga Liné are some of the actresses who embodied female desire when Francoism imposed archetypes that denied it.

Divided into two blocks, the compilation of articles gathered in

by Núria Bou and Xavier Pérez, is the continuation of another volume,

which investigate the forms of repression of the female libido

COMIC

By Tommaso Koch

Fabien Roché - Translation by Montserrat Terrones - Garbuix Books, 2022. 64 pages.

€24.95

A lady sleeps on her couch.

She suddenly wakes up because something hits her hip.

It looks like a stone.

But, in reality, it is the beginning of one of the most peculiar events in history: Ann Elizabeth Hodges was the first human being hit by a meteorite that fell from the sky.

Money, legal fights, pain and hope mix from then on in an amazing but real story.

And in a surprising comic, which puts all the power of the medium at the service of her story.

Louka Butzbach - Translation by Joana Carro and César Sánchez - Fulgencio Pimentel, 2022. 56 pages.

€16.85

Summer, vacation time.

Few will miss the office.

And even less after reading this comic.

In her first long comic, the author disguises as a tender fable a tale as devastating as it is subtle about the capitalist system and its oppression.

It reads very fast.

But her reflections stay in the brain much longer.

“The work, really, who likes it?”, they wonder in the town where the book is set.

It may be that, in September, more than one will continue to wonder.

Timothy Snyder - Illustration by Nora Krug - Translation by Esther Cruz Santaella - Salamandra Graphic, 2022. 128 pages.

€21.85

Some will say that it is not exactly a comic.

Perhaps neither was Krug's previous work,

It matters up to a point.

What really counts is that both books take advantage of the alliance between word and image to draw complex, fascinating and necessary ideas.

A manifesto of resistance against populism, easy solutions, insults, the rise of the extreme right and the arrogance of power.

A book to lie under the umbrella and still raise barricades: in the head.

Manuel Gutiérrez and Manuel Romero (illustration) - Cascaborra Ediciones, 2022. 136 pages.

20 euros

Locked away in the Quinta del Sordo, an estate on the outskirts of Madrid, Francisco de Goya made some of the most admired works in the history of art.

The reader —better if isolated in turn in some peaceful rural house— will now be able to relive that creative storm that gave life to the famous

And contemplate the courage of a comic that dares to evoke the art of the Aragonese master.

An overwhelming work, a complete visual spectacle.

POETRY

By Luis Bagué Quílez

João Luís Barreto Guimarães - Translation by José Ángel Cilleruelo - Pre-Texts, 2022. 132 pages.

20 euros

After submerging itself in the troubled waters of

(2016), the new collection of poems by the Portuguese Barreto Guimarães allows us to discover, in a bilingual edition, the singularity of a voice that moves from metapoetic introspection to metaphysical restlessness, from social denunciation to culturalist frieze, from domestic intrahistory to collective history.

The author claims the dignity of second place, explores the inner life of everyday objects and dissects the evils of his homeland with sarcastic irony.

For vocational nomads.

María Ángeles Pérez López mineral fire - Broken Glass, 2021. 90 pages.

18 euros

Awarded the Critics' Prize,

exemplifies a writing in a permanent state of boiling, in which the Vallejo nerve coexists with telluric drag and reflective depth.

The intertextual melting pot that Pérez López summons in these pages does not function as a discursive sampler, but rather reveals a genealogy of dispossession and an attempt to capture the “thunderous buzz of reality”.

For those who believe that there is life under the skin and after language.

Orlando Mondragón - Viewer, 2022. 68 pages.

12 euros

The most recent Loewe Prize went to a proposal not suitable for hypochondriacs.

With a sharp lyrical scalpel, the Mexican poet and doctor Orlando Mondragón reflects here the daily traffic of a hospital and portrays the human microcosm that inhabits its floors.

Without mentioning it directly, the shadow of the pandemic is projected on a set of disturbing prints that oscillate between clinical asepsis and compassionate tear.

For readers attentive to the constants of our time.

NON-FICTION

By Mercedes Cebrian

Juan Evaristo Valls Boix

- Ned Editions, 2022. 192 pages.

€17.90

The title promises as a summer reading, although this very personal philosophical essay on the advantages of giving up the maelstrom of life requires a great commitment on the part of the readers and a pencil to underline its most acute ideas, which are many.

The author addresses those who, like him, are "

of existence" and at the same time feel the irresistible desire for inaction.

On his trip they accompany him from María Zambrano to Kierkegaard, passing through Britney Spears.

songs Charmian Clift - Translation by Patricia Antón - Gatopardo, 2022. 296 pages.

€21.95

How the artists and writers of the Anglosphere like the Mediterranean!

At first chance, they settle in the Greek islands to find out what life offers in those parts.

It happened to the Durrell family and also to Charmian Clift and George Johnston, a couple who lived for ten years on the island of Kalymnos in the 1950s.

Clift is the one who was in charge of typing his experiences with a shrewd look full of humor that transports us directly to the Aegean Sea.

Giorgio Agamben - Translation by María Tereza d'Mesa Pérez and Rodrigo Molina-Zavalía - Adriana Hidalgo, 2022. 160 pages.

€19.50

In this free and personal essay, Agamben becomes the curator of an imaginary exhibition that brings together the works of art that have most marked him throughout his life.

As readers, the wisest thing is to let ourselves be guided by this exquisite sample through the lucid comments and associations of the Italian thinker.

In doing so, canvases such as

by Velázquez or

de Isabel Quintanilla will suddenly come to life.

Warren Ellis - Translation by Núria Molines - Alpha Decay, 2022. 232 pages.

€22.90

It all starts with the chewed gum that Nina Simone left on the piano at a concert.

Warren Ellis, musician and dedicated fan, picks it up and, years later, manages to get the gum to appear in an exhibition that pays tribute to the pianist and composer.

To find out what happened in between, you have to read this autobiographical chronicle full of passion for everything that moves us —music, suitcases, photos…— and, therefore, full of those doses of enthusiasm that we miss in our daily lives.

BLACK NOVEL

By Juan Carlos Galindo

Susana Martín Gijón - Alfaguara, 2022. 472 pages.

€18.90

Third installment of the series of inspector Camino Vargas, a character that has been taking shape and that goes far beyond a big name.

An almost apocalyptic Seville, drenched in rain, hosts this classic crime thriller with the environment as a major theme.

The subplots with the rest of the cops work well in an excellently paced narrative.

A book that improves the previous two (

and

) and perfect for a good summer reading time.

Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac - Translation by Susana Prieto Mori - Siruela, 2022. 204 pages.

€21.95

It is to celebrate the reissue of this essential classic of the black novel.

The pair of authors revolutionized the panorama of criminal fiction in the fifties with this work and

(

in the cinema).

His merit?

Eliminate the investigator, make novels with the victim at the center and, as Pierre Lemaitre said in his

Novels : "Magic endures because the technique is one of the most refined in the panorama of French crime novels."

Niklas Natt och Dag - Translation by Pontus Sánchez Giménez - Salamandra, 2022. 448 pages.

€19.95

The Swedish author closes with this novel the trilogy with which he turned the genre upside down through a perfect mix of police and historical.

Set in Stockholm during the year of the title, a politically turbulent and socially fascinating time, the story maintains the levels of violence and darkness of the previous ones.

It can be enjoyed as a trilogy, but also separately.

At the level of Hervé Le Corre or Hilary Mantel.

Jacqueline Winspear - Translation by Fernando Mateo - Maeva, 2022. 336 pages.

€21.90

Maisie Dobbs is a pioneering detective in 1929 London. She has lived through World War I, as her external and internal injuries attest.

She is brilliant and the men she crosses paths with are very wrong to put her down.

The first dialogue with a high-class man who demands his services to find out if his wife is unfaithful to him makes any reader who is fond of the genre want to stay in the world of Dobbs.

Classic plots very well carried.

The second part arrives in September.

CHILDISH

By Cecilia Jan

Tom Gauld.

Salamandra Graphic, 2022. Up to 5 years (prereaders), 40 pages.

€15.50

This endearing and fun album will hook both the little ones, as a story to read to them before bed, and those who are beginning to read on their own.

After a long time wishing for it, the king and queen are finally parents, to a little wooden robot and a princess who transforms into a trunk at night, and who only returns to her human form with a few magical words.

Everyone is happy until one morning, they mistake her for a real log.

Daniel Nesquens - Illustration by Mathias Sielfeld.

Flamboyant, 2022. From 6 to 9 years old.

64 pages.

€18.90

For the most curious readers, or for fans of spy stories, a non-fiction book that explains everything about the job: what a spy is, what types exist and what techniques they use, with historical curiosities, a compilation of the best fictional spies and even how to encrypt messages.

A book with the usual funny and surprising flashes of the writing of Daniel Nesquens, one of the most ingenious Spanish authors, as Pablo Cruz, the director of the specialized magazine

Torben Kuhlmann - Translation by Alicia Rodríguez González.

Editorial Juventud, 2022. From 9 to 12 years old.

126 pages.

23 euros

A beautifully illustrated and edited book that brings us closer, without realizing it, to the figure of Einstein, through the funny adventure of a mouse that insists on going back in time to attend the largest cheese fair in the world. , describes Ester Madroñero, from the Kirikú and the witch bookstore, in Madrid.

The adventures of the mouse, who spends 80 years in his time jump, mix history and fantasy.

The book includes a biography of Einstein and an exposition of his discoveries.

Hannah Gold - Illustration by Levi Pinfold - Translation by Marcelo E. Mazzanti.

Duomo, 2022. 320 pages 15.90 euros

Although her father assures her that there are no polar bears left on Bear Island, April, who has moved with him to this small piece of the Arctic, has an encounter with one that will change her life.

An inspiring adventure novel about the friendship between a girl and a wild animal that has been isolated by the melting ice, which makes you reflect on the consequences of climate change and moves you to action, with beautiful and moving illustrations.

YOUTH

By Cecilia Jan

Jonathan Auxier - Translation by Gemma Rovira - Blackie Books, 2022. 336 pages.

23 euros

In Victorian London, orphaned Nan Sparrow is the best chimney sweep in town.

But many days, after exhausting work and mistreatment from her boss, she feels alone, although she is not: she has a monster, a golem born from a piece of ash, who waits in silence to help her. .

Oscar Wilde, highlights Román Belmonte, author

of the blog

Wild Things Are : LIJ.

Gaëlle Geniller.

The Dome, 2022. 236 pages.

34 euros

This moving and luminous graphic novel tells the story of Rosa, a 19-year-old boy who grew up in El Jardin, a cabaret in Paris in the 1920s, along with his mother and the other dancers, and who now also needs express yourself and get on stage.

Identity, difference, love, friendship and family are present in the second work, full of sensitivity, by the young French screenwriter, illustrator and colorist Gaëlle Geniller.

Mónica Rodríguez - Lóguez Ediciones, 2021. 176 pages.

€13.95

A weekend of skiing in a hostel will change the look of the protagonist, Cecilia, through the observation of the relationships of the elderly, the discovery of love and desire, and a harsh revelation that she accidentally witnesses.

A brave novel about the discovery of the adult world and the loss of childhood, by one of the most talented literary authors in our country, as described by Pablo Cruz, director of

SCIENCE FICTION

By Laura Fernandez

Catriona Ward - Translation by Cristina Macía Orio - Alianza Editorial, 2022. 272 ​​pages.

€21.95

A tweet from Stephen King turned, overnight, Catriona Ward into the best thing that had happened to terror so far in the 21st century.

, and its multiple points of view, was a brilliantly macabre twist to the genre, a twist that revalidates

—Shirley Jackson Award—, a gothic delight with a satanic cult, cursed children and great and dark (and sectarian) background villain.

Ward's is another league, always.

Dave Eggers - Translation by Carlos Milla Soler - Random House Literature, 2022. 528 pages.

€23.65

In 2013, Dave Eggers tried to alert us with

, a capitalist technological dystopia, or slow-burn apocalypse satire, the risk we run by leaving ourselves in the hands of the algorithmic.

And not being able to get that universe —that of a kind of Total Social Network— out of his head and telling himself that he had to loop the loop by incorporating the Seller —a kind of fierce Amazon— he signed this second installment that affects the matter, from what turns into a rivetingly terrifying keyboard adventure novel.

Cixin Liu - Translation by Agustín Alepuz Morales - Nova, 2022. 224 pages.

€18.91

The author of the novel that blew up the

Chinese science fiction

— and showcased his own exciting Golden Age, is back.

And he has done it with a fable —in the most classic sense— in which he mixes ants and dinosaurs, which serves him to reconstruct life on Earth —since the beginning of time— and to reflect on his more than probable end.

Elegance and boldness.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

By Luis Gago

Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig - Translation by Carlos Fortea - Cliff, 2022. 160 pages.

16 euros

A great card player, Strauss was able to deftly handle several decks at the same time: he agreed to compose the anthem for the Berlin Olympics at the behest of the Nazi leaders, but at the same time collaborated with the Jew Stefan Zweig, to whom he confessed in a letter intercepted by the Gestapo that temporized with the regime in order to avoid “greater evils”.

The correspondence between the two, brief but substantial, reveals the encounter ─ultimately a clash─ between two colossi.

Benet Casablancas - Gutenberg Galaxy, 2020. 634 pages.

32 euros

This is a dense book to read when you have many hours and few distractions ahead of you.

Its reading requires effort, but in return it identifies and unravels many keys necessary to understand many essential features of musical Romanticism, which produced many peaks of Western culture.

The author ─a Catalan of Germanic training─ prolongs, by natural inclination, his journey until the dawn of the 20th century.

Eugenio Trías and Hermann Danuser endorse his investigations, in prologue and epilogue: almost nothing.

POP MUSIC

By Carlos Marcos

Maxine Gordon - Turner, 2022. 348 pages.

€29.90

Dexter Gordon (1923-1990) fue pilar fundamental de la época dorada del jazz. También alumbró una biografía cargada de épica. Se enganchó estrepitosamente a la heroína y estuvo en la cárcel, para remontar ya mayor e incluso estar nominado al Oscar por su brillante interpretación en Round Midnight (1986). Su viuda, Maxine Gordon, escribe, obviamente con información de primera mano, sobre la palpitante vida de músico. Un libro apasionante para los sibaritas del jazz clásico y disfrutable para los que no diferencien un saxo tenor de un saxo alto, porque ofrece información interesante sobre la sociopolítica cultural estadounidense del siglo XX.

Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock - Translation by Ainhoa ​​Segura Mayor - Neo-Person, 2022. 560 euros.

€24.70

It is popularly known as

due to the fact that the members of the groups wore long hair.

He was always treated unfairly by that arrogant and unreliable doctrinal press.

But the years go by and those albums get bigger.

This book is a spectacular oral history told in statements by the protagonists.

Members of Mötley Crüe, Poison, Van Halen, Whitesnake... It doesn't matter if someone isn't a fan of the genre.

Because it is fun, crazy and educational.

And it highlights a scene that, above lacquer, produced great hymns.

ECONOMY

By Amanda Mars

Javier Blas and Jack Farchy - Translation by Alicia Botella, Miguel Trujillo, Eva Blázquez and Paula Orellana - Peninsula, 2022. 528 pages.

€22.90

Commodity traders are what make it possible for us to drink coffee or have mobile phones.

Also, those who helped Saddam Hussein to export oil avoiding United Nations sanctions;

those who provided crude oil to Fidel Castro in exchange for sugar or those who came to the aid of the Russian oligarch Igor Sechin, boss of the Rosneft oil company and an ally of Vladimir Putin, when he needed 10,000 million dollars immediately.

To the rhythm of a

, Bloomberg journalists Javier Blas and Jack Farchy recount the ins and outs of an all-powerful industry but little known by the general public.

Thomas Piketty - Translation by Daniel Fuentes - Deusto, 2021. 296 pages.

€18.95

Perhaps it is the most optimistic work of Thomas Piketty, the French economist who has managed like few others to place the issue of inequality at the center of the economic debate.

The book reviews the comparative —and entertaining— history of inequalities between social classes and reflects the trend towards greater socioeconomic balance.

Over the decades, societies have created rules and institutions to distribute wealth, but these, Piketty warns, respond to political options.

Options, therefore, reversible.

Ray Dalio - Translation by Diego Sánchez de la Cruz - Deusto, 2022. 672 pages.

€24.95

The latest book by Ray Dalio, one of those guys who can shake the stock markets of half the planet with a single call, deals with the rise and fall of great empires, with a historical perspective but, also, with one foot in the present: China's attack on the United States.

While he was writing it, the pandemic was declared and the work took unforeseen paths.

Dalio, director of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, uses a title similar to his bestseller,

(2018), for this work, but it should not be read as a sequel.

AUDIOBOOK

By Berna González Harbor

Joseph Conrad - Narrated by Juan Echanove - Audible Studios.

4 hours, 53 minutes.

€13.99

There are many ways to read and one of them is to listen, a verb that can be used simultaneously with walking, cooking and even (trying to) sleep.

Juan Echanove's narration of

by the great Joseph Conrad, puts you on the boat in which Marlow goes into the Congo River while the "cannibals" turn out to be people you can work with.

The journey upstream in search of Kursk is as grand as it is terrifying.

Gustave Flaubert - Narrated by Macarena García.

Audible Studios.

12 hours, 28 minutes.

€19.99

There are books to which it is essential to return from time to time and the version of

, by Gustave Flaubert, narrated by Macarena García, helps us to verify its validity and the reasons why it is a great embryo of the modern novel.

Able to put himself in the skin of weakness, boredom, nervous breakdown, adultery, betrayal and abandonment, the author showed that the true love story is that of someone who is faithful.

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