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Reading is one of the best tools to think differently.
Some of the books that will arrive in bookstores in the coming weeks precisely manage to invite us to rethink stories and securities.
They can be history books - which review the explanation of Francoism - or novels - which go beyond the topic and show the problems of enriched African Americans.
They can be comics that show the clichés that have existed about femininity or autobiographical investigations to discover that our grandparents were not as noble as they had told us.
From Latin America to northern Europe, from young writers to prestigious journalists, the most anticipated works of February discover that we can be others to be ourselves.
Or invent ourselves, as Enrique Vila-Matas did with his false interviews from half a century ago.
Ritual
Sandrine Destombes
Translation by José Antonio Soriano Marco.
Reservoir Books, 2024. 368 pages.
20.81 euros
Seven feet in the Seine, with his shoes and an inscription on the sole.
This is the mystery that Captain Martin Vaas must discover.
The new detective novel written by Sandrine Destombes – a successful author, compared to Fred Vargas and who has already been awarded the Grand Prix VSD du Polar – is another labyrinth.
Connecting the dots will take the research team back twenty years.
Are there one or more murderers involved?
On sale February 1st.
Look for it in your bookstore
black boy
Richard Wright
Translation by Eduardo Hojman.
Alianza Editorial, 2024. 320 pages.
22.50 euros
A year before settling in Paris, where he arrived to escape racism and political persecution (he was being investigated by the FBI), Richard Wright published this founding
memoir
of 20th century North American culture.
That the work is a classic is demonstrated by the fact that it is one of the titles in the select catalog of the Library of America.
It is an autobiographical story, from his childhood in a Mississippi town to his arrival as an adult in Chicago, which builds a history of oppression within and outside the black community.
On sale February 1st.
Look for it in your bookstore
Thirst.
An anthropological (and personal) history of life in low-rain lands
Virginia Mendoza
Debate, 2024. 288 pages.
19.85 euros
According to a UN report, the absence of water has killed 650,000 people in the last fifty years and is estimated to have caused seven hundred million displacements in 2023. Drought conditions the present in many parts of Spain and the lack of water even threatens the country's main industry, which is tourism, in the medium term.
The journalist and anthropologist Virginia Mendoza starts from her family memories in a town in La Mancha to create a history of water through its absence.
And without water there is no civilization.
On sale February 1st.
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Pollak's arm
Hans von Trotha
Translation by Jorge Seca.
Periférica, 2024. 168 pages.
18.00 euros
This novel demonstrates how knowledge of cultural history can be transformed into literary wisdom.
Hans von Trotha received his doctorate with a thesis on the interrelation between philosophy, literature and garden design.
That look is at the base of
Pollak's Arm
.
The protagonist is the art historian Ludwig Pollak, who in 1906 discovered the missing right arm of Laocoön in the famous ancient Roman sculpture
Laocoön and his sons
of him.
When the Nazis chase him, a monsignor tries to save him and thus begins a long conversation about the struggle between beauty and human unreason.
On sale February 5.
Come to this court and cry.
How the Holocaust ends
Linda Kinstler
Translation by Magdalena Palmer.
Leopard, 2024. 348 pages.
23.95 euros
Mossad killed Herbertt Curkus in Montevideo.
Linda Kinstler's paternal grandfather served with this Latvian aviator in a
Nazi
kommando responsible for the burning of the Riga ghetto and the massacre of 25,000 Jews.
Like other great non-fiction of recent years, research on the family activates a reflection on identity, the politics of memory, law and history.
If Anne Applebaum says it, it would be worth it: “It reminds us of the dangerous instability of truth and testimony, and the urgent need, in the 21st century, to continue telling the story of the 20th century.”
On sale February 5.
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Our mothers
Gemma Ruiz Palà
Translation by Gemma Deza Guil.
Prologue by Katixa Agirre.
Consonni, 2024. 320 pages.
22.90 euros
This novel, which won the Premi Sant Jordi and has been a bestseller, answers a difficult question for feminists today: were we fair to our mothers?
The journalist Gemma Ruiz Palà answers the question by imagining what the experience of gender identity was for women like her mother.
With oral and playful prose, with well-graded emotionality, here is the moral and sentimental chronicle of several generations of women.
On sale February 5.
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The handsome ones
Esther García Llovet
Anagrama, 2024. 112 pages.
16.90 euros
Few places seem as literarily magnetic as a campsite.
That variant of non-places with their peculiar human fauna.
If, in addition, disturbing, and perhaps paranormal, geometric shapes appear every day in a field next to her facilities, everything seems to indicate that Esther García Llovet had to write
Los guapos
.
Because “narrative recklessness” was required (Valentín Roma).
Because strange things are going to happen while Nino Bravo is playing and in the nearby forest there is a cruising
area
or a
vintage
gas station .
We are left in the hands of Adrián Sureda and the fun.
On sale February 7.
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An island adrift.
A journey through the cracks of the United Kingdom
Ana Carbajosa
Peninsula, 2024. 304 pages.
19.90 euros
Bastenier wrote it when reviewing
The Tribes of Israel
: “Carbajosa has gone through, asked, listened, compared and concluded many things that, to comply with the best rules of reporting, are there below the first waterline of the text, so that "The reader takes the last part of the journey for himself."
Then it was the book about a great figure in European politics—Merkel—and now another ambitious journalistic venture, always with the method of demands, conversations and trips to understand and answer a question: when did the United Kingdom screw up? ?
On sale February 7.
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Madonnas and whores
Nine Antico
Translation by Regina López Muñoz.
Garbuix Books, 2024. 144 pages.
24.95 euros
Ágata: her father has locked her in a sanatorium to escape the scandal of her mother's death at the hands of a lover.
There Lucia arrives: she had slept with a German soldier at the end of the Second World War and for that she has been disowned.
Rosalía: she revealed the name of gangsters from her town and she must be protected for having testified against them.
Never mind her innocence, her courage and her determination.
Social values are going to put an end to them.
That triptych of three saints, seen as three whores, is both a tragedy and a sociological study drawn by the illustrator and filmmaker Nine Antico.
On sale February 7.
Look for it in your bookstore
Kierkegaard.
The philosopher of anguish and seduction
Joakim Garff
Translation by Juan Evaristo Valls Boix.
Tusquets, 2024. 960 pages.
32 euros
For
The New Yorker,
John Updike was a luxury collaborator and in 2005 he did not hesitate to write a long and ambitious review of the English translation of what was to become the reference biography of one of the most influential thinkers of modernity. : Kierkegaard.
Now, finally, it is translated into Spanish after years of methodical work with the Danish original.
The author of the book is a theologian named Joakim Garff, who has dedicated his entire life to the study of the work and life of the man who has been considered the father of existentialism.
Updike liked the conversational tone of the biography and did not hesitate to select an adjective to describe it: monumental.
On sale February 7.
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Fair play
Tove Jansson
Translation by Carmen Montes Cano.
Minúscula, 2024. 112 pages.
18 euros
Tove Jansson became popular as a cartoonist for the Moomins comics, a family of Scandinavian trolls that look like hippos.
She was also a writer and is a central figure in Finnish culture, with
a biopic
included.
In 1989 the original edition of Fair Play
was published
.
There is something from Jansson's private life in this novel because the protagonists are a couple of women and the theme of the book, apparently minor but so human, is the quiet exploration of the domestic everyday life where most of us spend our lives.
On sale February 7.
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In the kingdom of the sacred bull
Jordi Soler
Alfaguara, 2024. 272 pages.
18.91 euros
In a dialogue about the geography of his novel, Jordi Soler referred to the Veracruz mountain range.
“I was born and raised there and this allows me to have a palette of
inputs
that I don't have anywhere else.”
In a lost town in that geography lives Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting or wild animals.
This civilizational contrast is what gives a mythical dimension to this novel.
Because there is the passion for the wild animal and, at the same time, the passion of those who live in the town for it and in that labyrinth of passions the beautiful coexists with the atrocious, the exotic with the primitive...
On sale on the 8th of February.
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Trips to unimaginable lands
Dasha Kiper
Translation by Francisco J. Ramos Mena.
Asteroid Books, 2024. 312 pages.
21.95 euros
It is one of the great topics of our time and about which we do not know very well how to talk: the effects of caring for people with dementia.
From her professional experience, because she deals with people who care for those who suffer from this degenerative disease, clinical psychologist Dasha Kiper has written a great story about compassion.
There is no brain that can resist that pressure.
The brain reacts as expected in a circumstance like this: causing states of anger and frustration, disbelief and isolation, a lot of sadness.
Few voices like yours to accompany you on that journey.
On sale February 12.
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Mandarin
Ezequiel Perez
Eternal Cadence, 2024. 144 pages.
17.50 euros
There is famine in the town and its inhabitants must emigrate.
This is how the novel by Ezequiel Pérez, a specialist in colonial literature, begins.
In the story the chronicle of Indians resonates as a seed, but matures as a complex literary exercise.
The crux of the story is a river exploration commanded by a captain named La Mansa and whose mythical objective is to find the magical goldfish.
On sale February 12.
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She was me.
Memories of my transition
Lucy Sante
Translation by María Alonso Seisdedos.
KO Books, 2024. 224 pages.
21.76 euros
First it was an email announcing it to his friends.
Then a long exposition of his case in
Vanity Fair
.
She is Lucy Sante, paradigmatic of the best New York intellectuality, reference firm of The
New York Review of Books
.
An essayist who reflected again and again on the subculture and recounted her time straining the limits of autobiography.
And then another twist to the confession genre with this story in which she narrates her transition and that, in some way, challenges her trajectory: years of looking around her and she had not discovered herself.
On sale February 13.
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Eight invented interviews
Enrique Vila-Matas
Prologue by Mario Aznar.
H&O Editores, 2024. 112 pages.
13.90 euros
Enrique Vila-Matas is very young, he wants to be a film director, he lives in Barcelona and
Fotogramas
magazine makes him a proposal: translate that interview with Marlom Brando.
How to say no, even if he doesn't know English.
“How many children does he have?”
"Some.
Children are like flowers in the great meadow of love.”
He had made it up and relapsed.
The invented interviews—with Nureyev, Highsmith, Burgess…—are compiled in this volume, which includes a story that shows the connection between that original fable and its later literature.
On sale February 14.
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The Return of Captain Nemo.
The dark cities 12
Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten
Norma, 2024. 96 pages.
28.03 euros
Four decades ago Benoît Peeters and François Schuiten created the fantasy comic series titled
The Dark Cities
.
Delivery after delivery they built a parallel universe with philosophical resonances and from which the influence of Jules Verne's extraordinary travels was never excluded.
The Return of Captain Nemo
is already volume 12. It mixes comics, illustrated narration and Verne's story and also plays graphically with the illustrations from his books.
Now Nemo, who comes out of the
Nauti-Octopus
(a nod to the
Nautilus
) is a captain who has lost his memory and is taken on a new adventure.
On sale February 16.
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Linden Hills
Gloria Naylor
Translation by Shannel Julius and Blanca Gago.
Nordic, 2024. 387 pages.
23.95 euros
Dante's Inferno
did not end in the
Comedy , but has continued
to
illuminate the imagination of Western culture.
After a millennium, in a small geographical environment, this allegory returns that shows a little-told dimension of North American life: the black middle classes.
Linden Hills is a community where black people live and are successful professionals.
But two poets, who function like Dante and Virgil, see what lies beyond material success and discover an Eden that hides failure.
On sale February 19.
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Rights in the liberal tradition
Judith N. Shklar
Translation by Roberto Ramos Fontecoba.
Indomitable Page, 2024. 96 pages.
13.50 euros
The annual conference hosted by Colorado College coincided with the commemoration of the United States Bill of Rights.
The year was 1991. The speaker was Judith N. Shklar, of Latvian origin and the first woman professor in the political science department at Harvard University.
She focused her speech on rights liberalism.
With the humble maturity of her essayism, traversing the different traditions of liberalism, she raised the paradoxes and dilemmas of liberal politics.
Today it is more current than then.
On sale February 19.
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Not one, not big, not free.
The Franco dictatorship
Nicolas Sesma
Criticism, 2024. 760 pages.
25.90 euros
A new generation of historians claims their role in the discussion about our country's past with the publication of
Ni una, ni grande, ni libre
.
Nicolás Sesma has rethought the dictatorship, incorporating the most relevant research of recent years, and with an attractive discourse full of cultural references and without being captive to a single center of power or geography.
On sale February 21.
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I'm Milena from Prague
Monika Zgustova
Gutenberg Galaxy, 2024. 168 pages.
17.50 euros
For most readers, Milena is a name associated with Kafka.
But the virtue of Monika Zgustova's book is to present us with a character who goes beyond that relationship.
Because, as this documented novel that is published simultaneously in Catalan and Spanish develops, Milena Jesenskámadre was a journalist, translator, writer or part of the intellectual elite that met in the cafes of Vienna.
She is a leading figure of feminism and she faced the Nazi invasion and paid for it with her life.
She died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
On sale February 21.
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Scorpions
Sara Barquinero
Lumen, 2024. 816 pages.
22.71 euros
An intimate diary in which an interrupted love story was told pushed the protagonist of
I'll be alone and without a party
(2021), Sara Barquinero's previous book, on a trip throughout Spain to better get to know the author of those lines.
Now, the writer from Zaragoza delivers a complex story, a novel of novels of more than 800 pages that embarks its protagonists in a conspiracy theory deployed by political and economic powers that seek to control individuals and even induce them to commit suicide using hypnosis. and subliminal messages in books, video games and music.
On sale February 22.
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Money in your pocket
Asta Olivia Nordenhof
Translation by Maria Rosich Andreu.
Sixth Floor, 2024. 180 pages.
19.90 euros
If the Norwegian writer and playwright Jon Fosse has won the 2023 Nobel Prize and his most relevant novel (published in four volumes) is
Septology
, the Danish Asta Olivia Nordenhof (Copenhagen, 1988) seems not far behind in ambition.
Her first novel,
Money in My Pocket
, is already billed as a septology.
It will revolve around the arson scandal on the
Scandinavian Star
, a passenger ferry on which 159 people lost their lives in 1990, and the first installment of it aims high.
It begins with the story of a marriage with more shadows than lights whose destiny is linked to the fateful ship.
On sale February 26.
Life in miniature
Mariana Sandez
Impedimenta, 2024. 192 pages.
20.95 euros
The Argentine writer Mariana Sández (1973) stood out in 2021 with the publication of
A house full of people
, in which the protagonist, Charo, surrounded by neighbors very present in the farm where she lives, tries to reconstruct the figure of her mother recently. deceased through a box full of photos and clues.
Now, following in the footsteps of the narrative of Natalia Ginzburg or Iris Murdoch, Sández publishes
La vida minima
, a story about the past of a woman with an apparently bland, minimal, invisible life, who decides to escape that destiny and retrace her path.
On sale February 26.
Look for it in your bookstore
Mozart's 'Requiem'.
A cultural history
Miguel Angel Marin
Prologue by Juan José Carreras.
Cliff, 2024. 496 pages.
26 euros
Cover of 'The 'Requiem' by Mozart.
A cultural history', by Miguel Ángel Marín.
A few years ago, a version of Mozart's 'Requiem' found in the cathedral of Pamplona, allowed researcher Miguel Ángel Marín to confirm the reach and impact that the Salzburg genius had outside of Central Europe: and much earlier than previously thought. documented.
In this case, it was played in 1844 in Pamplona as part of the royal funeral of the Infanta Luisa Carlota de Borbón-Dos Sicilias.
Now, Acantilado publishes a wonderful analysis by Marín about one of the most universal pieces in the history of music, “whose story is not only fascinating, rich and complex, but is also full of mirages, traps and misunderstandings.”
On sale February 28.
Look for it in your bookstore
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