What better occasion than a year rich in literary anniversaries like this 2024 –among others, 300 years since the birth of Inmanuel Kant and 100 of Truman Capote and Francisco Nieva, 200 of the death of Lord Byron100 of the death of Angel Guimera…– to reread, or discover, three great authors of the 20th century.
June 3 will mark the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka and Páginas de Espuma pays homage to the author of ‘Metamorphosis’ with a new and luxurious translation of his entire short narrative, by Alberto Gordo and with a prologue Andrés Neuman (€35).
It’s also been a century since he left us Joseph Conrad (it will do so on August 3), a reason that Edhasa has taken advantage of to launch a bilingual Spanish-English edition of the story ‘Youth’translated by Amado Diégez and which also has the introduction of Arturo Pérez-Reverte and illustrations by Augusto Ferrer-Dalmau and Juan Vicuña (€12.50).
And to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Wilkie Collinson January 8, Alba recovers ‘The Woman in White’his greatest success and the germ of the detective novel, by Miguel Temprano (€39.50).
‘The Jungle Books’
Rudyard Kipling. Sunrise. €16.
Many readers are unaware that ‘The Jungle Book’ is actually two books: ‘The Jungle Book’ (1894) and ‘Second Jungle Book’ (1895). This volume includes both, as the British author of Indian origin wanted, and also adds ‘In the Ruj’ (1893), a story in which Mougli appears for the first time.
‘Cante Jondo Poem’
Federico García Lorca. Kingdom of Cordelia. €26.95.
Edition by Luis Alberto de Cuenca and with illustrations by Raúl Arias of this work that Federico García Lorca wrote for the First Cante Jondo Competition, in 1922 in Granada, and which took 10 years to see the light. In it he seeks the essence of what is Andalusian through pain and sorrow, love and death.
‘Book of restlessness’
Fernando Pessoa. Soul. €24.95.
An unfinished and unfinished work, on which the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner worked throughout his life. It is presented as the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, a “semiheteronym” of the author: “It is me, minus the reasoning and the affectivity.” With translation by Ana Lucía de Bastos Herrera and drawings by António Jorge Gonçalves.
‘The poem of the rose als llavis’
Joan Salvat-Papasseit. Angle. €16.90.
Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the death and the 130th anniversary of the birth of the Barcelona author, a prominent representative of Catalan avant-garde, several stamps are recovering his works, such as this sensual collection of poems in which he covers the entire love process, from courtship to farewell. Illustrated by Laura Borràs Dalmau.
‘The crime on Fuencarral street’
Benito Pérez Galdós. Siruela. €15.95.
In 1888, the year in which Jack the Ripper acted for the first time, another crime shocked the people of Madrid: the brutal murder of Luciana Borcino. The case fascinated the author of the National episodes, who sent six chronicles to an Argentine newspaper that today can be seen as the first national true crime. Prologue Lorenzo Silva.
Also in the same collection, ‘La gota de sangre’, by Emilia Pardo Bazán and with a prologue by Alicia Giménez Bartlett.
‘The magic mountain’
Thomas Mann. Pocket-size. €16.95.
This year also marks one century since the publication of the German author’s masterpiece, which he conceived as a short novel but which ended up exceeding a thousand pages (in this limited hardcover edition, 1,056). In it he portrays Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, plunged into an intellectual, moral and political crisis.
