The book world, which generally concentrates its fairs on dates close to Sant Jordi, also wanted to gain a space in those hot months that are generally covered by music, film, theater and dance festivals. The truth is that events such as La Setmana del Llibre en Català –which has been giving way to the rentrée for decades– or Poesía i , which is now preparing to face its second week, are already taking a certain lead. But now they wanted to add the Booket Fest, promoted by the Booket label.
María Oruña and Megan Maxwell were the guests of honor at this new event, which aims to claim summer as one of the seasons with the most readers. “It’s when people finally have vacations and time to rest and read, so a meeting like this makes all the sense in the world,” Oruña advanced minutes before opening the doors. Meanwhile, at the entrance to the Antigua Fábrica Estrella Damm in Barcelona, ??more than a hundred people waited patiently to see their favorite authors, with whom they could take pictures, exchange opinions and spend an evening, in which literary games and music were not lacking. .
All attendees were summoned through a social media contest, making the event exclusive. However, “in view of the success, we do not rule out opening it to the public in the future,” they assured La Vanguardia from the editorial.
Another event that also had great convening power this week was the tribute to the writer Vicenç Pagès Jordà, who passed away early last August, on the occasion of the Spanish translation by Penguin Random House of one of his most outstanding works: The Players. of whist. Even the Laie bookstore in Barcelona was approached by friends, relatives and even students of the author, who wanted to remind him when the first anniversary of his death is about to be fulfilled.
Those in charge of conducting the presentation were the writer Antoni Puigverd and the publishers Miguel Aguilar and Berta Pagès, the latter daughter of Vicenç, who assured that “my father would have been very excited that his book would come out again in Spanish and do it in Penguin’s hand, because since I started working here as an editor, he knew that we would end up working in some way.”
Aguilar, for his part, advanced that it was not the first time that the work had been published in Spanish, since years ago there was a translation by the Flavia Company in a small Barcelona publishing house. However, “we wanted it to return to bookstores and it was coherent that it be done now as a tribute. The book is also worth it. I read an article in which the 25 most important cultural artifacts of the last 25 years in Catalonia were cited and the book that stood out was this one. So I decided to read it and I was amazed. I didn’t expect it to be the novel I found. It could have been written by Hanif Kureishi or any other British writer. However, he was from here and I believed that the text in Spanish deserved to exist again ”.
It was not the only tribute that took place this week. The Institut d’Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya (IEFC) did the same with Jane Austen by the hand of Alejandra Carles-Tolra. The Catalan photographer is known for her work focused on groups that have a very strong identity. “I am interested in how people find their own identity and a safe place in a closed collective”, she explained during a conversation with Josep Maria de Llobet, from Ediciones Posibles. Thus, I come to the Janeites, a group of women, “and the occasional man”, who dress as regency, read the stories of the British writer devotedly and gather in large houses for a few days to do activities related to them and evoke the times in which Mr. Darcy lived and aroused passions.
“It all started one weekend when I visited the English city of Bath. I had just moved to England and wanted to see the ins and outs of the country. There I found a large group of people in period costumes who, as they explained to me, went to the Jane Austen festival. They told me they only dressed up once a year, but there were much more devoted fans who did it more often, so I started researching.” He dedicated years to the task and the result was a photographic report that has traveled halfway around the world and found its place in festivals such as PhotoEspaña, in Madrid, or Asama Photo in Japan.
Although the tour of the images seems to have no end, since there are several exhibition halls that have been interested in them in this time, Carles-Tolra admitted that “it was always clear to me that they would end up starring in a book.” After a crowdfunding campaign, this dream has just become a reality and reaches readers and lovers of photography under the title Where we belong, which in Spanish would be where we belong.
The aforementioned books are just a small sample of the many readings that arrive at bookstores every week and that are well worth a try at any time of the year. Yes, in summer too.
