Ana Bilic
Ana Bilic is a literary author, screenwriter and
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View Rights PortalHERRALDE PRIZE 2020 - Approximately half of us confess to being sexually unfaithful to our partners. But are the other half telling the truth or are they lying? There is only one way to find out: use private detectives or electronic surveillance to observe their lives. This novel proposes an anthropological experiment: to monitor six thousand people without their consent, so that we finally have reliable data about sexual behaviour in our societies. Irene, the novel’s protagonist, is searching for the secrets of the human soul in our sexuality. She travels from Madrid to Chicago to study psychology, and there, far from her family, she embarks upon a scientific analysis of the men she meets and the men she sleeps with. Her cold investigator’s gaze changes, however, when she falls in love with an Argentinian, Claudio, who has a painful secret and whose family has a dark past linked to his country’s history. Cien noches is a novel about the human heart, an exploration of our erotic lives, and the tale of police attempts to track down a murderer who has left no trace of his crime. Cien noches explores the different forms love can take, including its most radical and extreme versions, and the variety of our sexual behaviours, some of which are similarly radical and extreme. It records the loyalty, the infidelity, the unmentionable desires, taboos, half-truths and deceptions that are an essential part of our relationships. It talks of masks and lies. And it playfully incorporates a series of adultery case studies written for Luisgé Martín by Edurne Portela, Manuel Vilas, Sergio del Molino, Lara Moreno and José Ovejero, in a thought-provoking exercise in literary promiscuity.
SHORTLISTED FOR IV PREMIO BIENAL DE NOVELA MARIO VARGAS LLOSA 2021 - One Friday in May, on what is shaping up to be a perfect day, there is a strange explosion in a building in Lyon. One of the flats in the now ruined building was occupied by a group of students from various countries who were having a party. Paul, student of Fine Art; Emma, tormented by the tortuous history of her Spanish family; Luca, fascinated both with mathematics and with the cyclist, Marco Pantani; and Ilka, a student who left Berlin with nothing more than a guitar on her back: these are the tenants of a house that was a popular meeting place for the city’s students. In the neighbouring flat, also hit by the explosion, lives a quiet Moroccan family, whose members are apparently well-integrated into French life. The novel explores events from various points of view. Through five narrators – victims and witnesses – we discover what happened that Friday night and the consequences that unfolded over the next three years, until their accounts have covered every hidden aspect of the explosion. Rewind explores whether it is possible to rewind events. And examines our personal ghosts, the role of chance, the people who in the end we do not become, the secrets that must or must not be told, and our capacity to remake ourselves when we are broken. This novel is an espionage operation that investigates the mechanisms of life. How it changes without warning, turns, throws you into the air and destroys you when you are least prepared for it. And, just as mysteriously, how – if you survive everything life has to throw at you – it then allows you to remake yourself and keep moving forward.
The story in this novel is utterly implausible – and yet it happened. One of the world’s leading museums, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, commissioned a piece from leading American sculptor Richard Serra to celebrate its inauguration in 1986. A sculpture weighing thirty-eight tons which one fine day… simply vanished into thin air. Nobody knew how it had disappeared, when it had happened, or who was responsible. A mixture of nonfiction novel and fictionalized reportage, combining the bizarre with the hallucinogenic, Masterpiece employs the pace of a thriller to reconstruct a case that poses some disturbing questions. How could something like this have happened? How does a copy become an original? What even is contemporary art? And what was the true fate of the famous, huge and immensely heavy steel sculpture that evaporated? Might it reappear one day? “I am especially amazed by the generosity of this polyphony. More than a stylisticaudacity, I see it as proof of great sensitivity. The author speaks masterfully of contemporaryart, addressing the relationship between the original and the copy and the collective dimension of a work. It also inspires a keen awareness of history. Even more impressive, it offers a scathing vision of our present, and more particularly our political present. It is admirable to have succeeded in turning a work as rectangular as Equal-Parallel / Guernica-Bengasi into a prism that refracts the world so powerfully”.Benjamin Burguete, editor at Le Bruit du Monde (France)
Laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving and featuring an unforgettable cast of characters - from Ecuadorian drivers to Spanish Bowie lookalikes - Rolling Fields is a novel full of the grace and messiness of life: brave, exciting and completely irresistible. Dani Mosca is 40 and his father has just died. Fulfilling his father's last wishes, Dani embarks on a road trip back to his childhood village, a three-hour hearse journey from Madrid. Leaving behind the busy streets of the city for the deserted, archaic heart of Spain, Dani revisits the key junctions of his life: his conflicted relationship with a pragmatic and authoritarian father; the mystery of his birth; his school years in the repressed atmosphere of Catholic Spain; the origin of his band and its early successes; the emptiness left by a tragically lost friendship; his great loves. Underpinned by a sturdy structure, David Trueba once again brings his prodigious narrative prowess to bear, turning his penetrating gaze on the baffling contradictions that surround us and venturing forth, clear-eyed, into the labyrinth of emotion and feelings. The outcome is a dazzling book that throbs with life on every page.
A call from Carlos Saura put Stanley Kubrick in contact with Vicente Molina Foix, who, over twenty years of a relationship that only ended with the death of the director, translated into Spanish the dialogues of five of his films. This book is a chronicle of that work and of the sporadic but often juicy dealing with the filmmaker himself - in which an atypical interview that Molina Foix did at his home in the 80s, and which is included as an appendix – Above is about a portrait of him as an infinitely curious creator, maniacal in the demand for quality, who became the most famous and powerful figure in American cinema while still being a meticulous and artisan artist. A first-hand testimony of Stanley Kubrick's work ethic by the Spanish translator of five of his films.
A novel about the dead and the disappeared, for whom the search still endures, and against a far-right that has never left and turned into a universal threat. A noir novel that prolongs the possibility of the political novel. Paula Quiñones arrives in Azafrán as a volunteer to help locate civil war mass graves. Little by little, she integrates herself into the community and gets to know its power dynamics, governed by a family whose patriarch has just turned one hundred years old. The story becomes obscured, and the village becomes a threatening space in which Paula’s discoveries begin to put her in danger. Who were the dead that Paula is looking for? Who do the voices, that chase her like a tragic chorus of kids and women, belong to? A novel about economic and cultural violence, and about violence against women, that dissects accounts of memory. «Sanz has few possible competitors in her generation. If someone is called to remain in posterity, it’s her (…) She has talent, brightness, and nerve. It's literature in its pure state (…) With each narration that carries her signature, the miracle of good literature is produced» (Ángeles López, La Razón). «small red women—like so, in lowercase—is a subversive game that becomes a homage. The story of Paula, a middle aged inspector who arrives in the imagined location of Azafrán to work on a project of historical memory (…) The far-right’s boom in Spain and around the world has given this story an unexpected urgency. Or maybe not so unexpected (…) The novel takes from many genres and at the same time transcends them, manipulates them. But, like the previous two parts of the trilogy, it bathes in the noir and plays with it» (Juan Carlos Galindo, El País).
EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE A novel of the mountain in which humans, the animal kingdom, and the vegetal kingdom take the floor to tell an incredibly beautiful story of love, friendship, and redemption. Domènec, a peasant and a poet, and Sió, his wife and a beautiful and determined girl, move to Matavaques, his country house in the mountains close to the border with France. During one of their usual walks, Domènec dies hit by lightning during a storm. Sió must carry on running the farm and with the education of their children Mia and Hilari, who are still very young. The local legends and the landscape of the Pyrenees shape the imagination and sensibility of these children who have a wonderful friendship with a neighbor their age: the strong and mysterious Jaume. He and Mia enter into a relationship. When they are just 20, Hilari and Jaume go hunting and Jaume accidentally kills Hilari. He never returns to the village when he gets out of prison. Time passes, Mia is a shy woman who lives only with the company of her dog Lluna. One night when he’s had too much to drink at the bar where he works as a cook, Jaume runs over a deer with his car. When he realizes that the animal is still alive, he feels the impulse to go back to Matavaques to finally talk to Mia. With an overflowing and contagious energy, Solà has written a tight novel with beautiful prose full of textures and a daring game of points of view. «Solà's prose seduces us with her exultant ability to write about memory, knowledge, and life in a world of its own with enthusiasm and joy» (Ponç Puigdevall, El País).
Ambitious, solid, risky: a novel about solitude and exclusion that is disturbing like Highsmith and sexual like Lawrence. Nat, a young and inexperienced translator, has just moved to the small rural nucleus La Escapa. Her landlord will soon show his true colors and the conflicts surrounding the dilapidated rented house will become a real obsession for her. The rest of the area’s inhabitants will receive Nat with apparent normalcy, while deep down lie incomprehension and mutual strangeness. La Escapa will go on to acquire its own personality, oppressing and confusing, which will make Nat face not only her neighbors, but her own self and failures. Filled with silences and missteps, prejudices and implicit meanings, taboos and transgressions, Un amor confronts readers with the limits of their own morality in a novel in which, as though it were a Greek tragedy, the most unsuspected desires of its protagonists emerge while the community constructs a scapegoat. «What is fascinating about Sara Mesa is her ability to map the human condition through losers, the abuse of power, oppressive and isolated places, the slow and continuous degradation. That’s why her novels are so interesting: because they are always rough, bitter, sincere, dark, unpleasant and slow» (Ángeles López, La Razón).
An incisive, daring, vibrant, and shameless novel about community and class, the nation and money. After inheriting an enormous flat in the center of Barcelona, Clara Montsalvatges decides to transform it into a space where she can take care of friends who are going through a rough patch. But everything changes when a mysterious neighboring couple begins to shout and fight. Partly out of fear and partly as a game, Clara invites her ex-boyfriend to help her “resolve” the situation while they decide what to do with one another. After a night of yelling and fighting, Clara breaks into the flat across the hall and becomes a confidante for her neighbor Violeta Mancebo—the King of Cataluña’s daughter-in-law, who narrates a story in which her modest origins contrast with those of a wealthy, corrupt social class that holds power. A novel about money and class that melds with the best within the tradition of literature made in Barcelona. «It has something in common with novelists like Juan Marsé, Eduardo Mendoza, and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán» (José Antonio Montano, The Objective). «Torné can be perfectly placed alongside Philip Roth and Karl Ove Knausgård: he is a master of tone» (Tanya Sweeney, Independent).
A brilliant portrait of the Madrid you won’t find in tourist guides. A thriller with imagery and situations worthy of a David Lynch in a state of grace. A night in the outskirts of Madrid—gambling and bingo, gas stations and bars in the middle of nowhere. A starkly real Madrid in which suddenly the unexpected, even the magical, can happen. This is the backdrop for the characters of this novel, losers in search of an opportunity. Their names are Nikki and Sánchez. They’ve shared a life together in the past, but now they are separated. She has been dealing tobacco in the South and now has come back to Madrid where she has entered the world of gambling and greyhound races. He is famous for being jinxed and inclined to disappear. Nikki asks Sánchez to help her to deliver a greyhound named Cromwell to an Italian woman who is in the racing business. Over the course of an endless night, the couple will make its way through a spectral Madrid as they search for this greyhound and meet a cast of odd characters, such as the Serbian artist who has just put on a performance that consists of eating raw meat in the middle of a forest for 24 hours… «Esther García Llovet is a rara avis… The author questions every code, every image, every word… Wonderful» (Marta Sanz).
Stuck in the city during the scorching last week of July, the narrator remembers a scene from many years before: children playing in a street in the village and, from time to time, finding a half-dead rhinoceros beetle next to the pavement. The episode was repeated on certain nights in July: precisely at that moment, and he wasn’t there to see it. His partner was sleeping in the adjoining bedroom, recovering from a stroke. The narrator feels like that rhinoceros beetle from his childhood: a wounded animal, knocked over by life, always missing a leg, scarcely moving and not managing to get off the ground. Spanning three summers, “Winter butterflies and other nature stories” portrays the world of family relationships, drawing parallels with the insects which creep and crawl around the fields and woods, and coexist with people. Three main characters underpin the story – a man, a woman, and their son. Their goal: to return to the woods at the end of a long recovery process. With extraordinary sensitivity, Julià Guillamon takes us with him to the foot of a lime tree at the height of pollination, to a small square opposite a hostel where flying ants are swarming, to an abandoned country house where the most beautiful butterflies suck up the juicy flesh of plums. ” Winter butterflies and other nature stories “ begins as a story about animals, but later they take second place and the insects are the people. These bugs, real and extraordinarily documented, in this book, are a symbolic element connecting the living with the dead, a memory bridge which links the dreamlike world of childhood with the disillusionment of adults. It is also the border between the city which has wiped out nature and the rural environment which clings to nature as the hallmark of a blurring identity. A re-encounter with the essential, what we are made of and what supports us when everything seems to be collapsing. Because in taking care of the earth, we are also taking care of ourselves.
As the most authoritative professional design yearbook in Asia-Pacific region, Asia-Pacific Design (APD) has been published 15 volumes by Sandu Publishing since 2005. APD aims at promoting design in Asia-Pacific Region and providing good opportunities for excellent designers to stand out. The key to the design is to get deep feelings and experiences by constantly observing life and participating in society, to find the best creative point. With the development of the times, more tools are used to transmit information. The technological innovation has also expanded the depth and breadth of design. And design has become more diverse. Designers not only develop the traditional techniques, but also know how to integrate many different elements, such as color matching, creative graphics, online experience, cool AI/AR/VR/MR, etc. A multi-level design ecological language is formed with the diversity of design. In 2020, under the subject of “Multivariate Integration of Design,” APD No. 16 will explore how designers seek innovative solutions and possibilities for social, economic, and technological issues, together with the efforts of famous designers all over the region. All submitted works will be selected by the international jury to select the final result. For the first time, APD has set up the Best Design Award (20 pcs), Nomination Award (80 pcs), and Finalist.
Dear reader, in this booklet you will find 226 exercises that were designed to integrate into the cognitive training system Mental Skill in printed form, with the purpose to favor their daily exercise in situations or places where it is not possible to use a computer. These exercises are divided into groups of each of the skills cognitive skills that are worked on: linguistics, memory, logic and reasoning, attention and visuospatiality. The exercises can be performed non-sequentially, as they are designed to reinforce skills on which you are interested to focus your efforts; while you are traveling, resting or in your free time outside From home. You will find in electronic format within the Advanced CD all exercise templates, so you don't scratch your notebook and keep it in good condition for later use. Remember the motto that accompanies the system: “Challenges to be mentally fit ". So we invite you to use this booklet and go to work it's been said!
A cross between an academic article and ingenious reflection in a journalistic style, in this book the concept of the house is extended to the garden, not only in a literal sense, but also metaphorical: houses with gardens, gardens inside houses, the house understood as a garden. The journey includes well known historical examples as well as rarities from architects such as Le Corbusier, Lina Bo Bardi and Bernard Rudofsky to popular or anonymous architecture to expand upon the idea of the house and garden.
This volume, central to the work by location, is also central by content. We have already discussed the gifts of an attentive mind and a harmonious body. Here you will find the means to take advantage of these tools in a concrete way, and thus progress in the workplace and economically. In the first part, we spell out the keys to making a good initial impression and making your presence prevail in a cordial and convincing way at the same time. You will also find suggestions on time management, valuable concepts on how to acquire and sustain the habit of order, how to express yourself correctly and effectively, and everything related to establishing a good work methodology. The second part talks about the intimate relationship between work and wealth, and establishes what steps are necessary for all professional or work effort to bear fruit in a comfortable present and in a planned and solid future. From all this, you will draw conclusions that will strengthen not only your wishes for success, but also your real opportunities to achieve it, from now on ...
The beginnings of Contemporary Art explained as in a detective novel following the traces of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. This thrilling essay may not let us know who the real murderer is, but in the way we will learn about key issues on what we understand by Art today.