Bruno Blog

This volume brings together all the short stories written by Maria Barbal up to now, both those published in volumes and those scattered in periodicals or in thematic anthologies, as well as stories still unpublished, which are offered for the first time. All the short narrative of someone who has stood out above all as a novelist, but who from the beginning dedicated to short stories such splendid volumes as La mort de Teresa, followed by Ulleres de sol, La pressa del temps, Cada dia penso en tu, Pampallugues or Bari.

The possibility of offering the totality of the stories in this volume, organized in a different way from how they had reached us until now, opens up a new dimension, a renewed reading, and consequently gives us the possibility of taking a contemporary look. A new cosmovision that helps us to better enjoy all his novels.

The voice is always forceful, powerful in nuances, largely thanks to a precise and rich language, which enters smoothly and soaks everything. It is with his unmistakable style made of conciseness, clarity, which denotes great expertise, that we capture this soul that vertebrates everything.

Macondo Beach is a collection of short stories by Sebastià Bennassar, with the sea as the element that brings them all together. Therefore, we will discover writers caught in the Athlantic and Mediterranean beaches; stories close to the black novel, stories of shipwrecks that are not what they seem and even the characters turn themselves into islands, islands in an archipelago of dreams and desires. In short, a gateway to the world of one of the most prolific and singular narrators of contemporary Catalan narrative.

VIII Narrativa Marítima Vila de Cambrils Josep Lluís Savall Prize 2018

(1816, the year there was no summer)

Jordi Tello, the Instagram poet, returns with a new book of previously unpublished stories, through his poetic, fresh and new voice.

When someone breaks your heart, you ask yourself: “What part of me is so defective that it should go away? At what moment has it fallen out of love without telling me? Will it come back to see even how I am? When someone breaks your heart, you pray that he doesn’t leave yet, as if a few more minutes with you would be enough for him to love you again. You want to spend the little energy you haven’t cried yet to hold him anyway even if you know you can’t catch what is already a shadow. When someone breaks your heart you are invaded by insecurity, hatred, nostalgia. Guilt. When someone breaks your heart you are no longer the same.

In this book, Jordi Tello manages to braid sensitive and carnal love, madness, passion, uncertainty, absence and sadness. But also forgiveness. He does it with chivalry but in a direct and translucent way, almost crystalline. This is a work full of thoughts in liquid format.

BUT NA BUT … it was and was not a girl with the body hurt by the war but with the energy of an enormous heart fed by the histories of his mother. By the first time there are moved to the paper the oral stories of a country that, as Nadia, has changed identity but has not lost his essence. A gift for the Catalan readers, who have received this strong and brave woman in his land.

«I consider myself an agnostic friend of religions, an admirer of religions», says Vicenç Villatoro. “I am a skeptical Christian; a Christian that searches, someone who tries to understand better his beliefs”, says Francesc Torralba.

Over forty letters – twenty by correspondent – Francesc Torralba ans Vicenç Villatoro talk about questions such as God created or Creator God, the sacred and the profane, the religious sphere and the public sphere, death and consolation, ethics without God, beauty, the mystery of evil, the transmission of values and convictions, the existence of Christians, the ability to hold and spirituality without faith.

It is a dialogue of ideas, but also of experiences, written  during half year, between the beginning of Summer holidays and Christmas celebrations. The letters crossed between Torralba and Villatoro face not only a believer and a non-believer, but also a philosopher and a writer, a theologian and a journalist.