Snippet: a posthumous story collection by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2020)

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, La Ciudad de Vapor. Todos los cuentos [The city of steam: all the stories], 2020, 224 p.

publisher’s summary:

Carlos Ruiz Zafón conceived this work as a recognition of his readers who had followed him along the saga begun with The Shadow of the Wind.

«I can conjure the faces of the kids of the Ribera neighborhood with whom I sometimes played or fought in the street, but none which I would like to rescue from the land of indifference. None but that of Blanca.»

A boy decides to become a writer when he finds out that his inventions give him a few moments more with a rich girl who has stolen his heart. An architect flees from Constantinople with the plans of an unassailable library. A strange knight challenges Cervantes to write a book as has never existed before. And Gaudí, navegating to a mysterious meeting in New York, delights in light and steam, the matter cities should be made of.

The echo of the great characters and motives of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books novels resonates in theses stories by Carlos Ruiz Zafón –gathered together for the first time, and some of them unpublished so far– turning on the magic of the narrator who made us dream like nobody else.

One of the most popular posts on this blog is on a book by Ruiz Zafón: Labyrinth of Spirits (2016).

The Guardian offers an obituary (June 2020), in case you are unfamiliar with this author.

SOURCE: Planeta (publisher)

Snippet: FIL Literature prize to Lídia Jorge (2020)

The Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge (Boliqueime, 1946) is the 2020 winner of the Guadalajara International Book Fair’s Literature prize, endowed with USD 150,000.

Among the reasons cited by the jury are “the high quality of her work, that portrays the way in which humans face the big events of History. […] Her ‘brutal realism’ of her work in which she narrates the consequences of Portuguese colonialism”

According to Carlos Salinas “Jorge is considered the most important living novelist of her country.”

As reported by Felipe Sánchez, she grew up in a small village of the Algarve, studied Romance philology at Universidade de Lisboa and worked as a high school teacher in Angola and Mozambique during the last years of the colonial wars in Africa.

He cites as one of Jorge’s important novels the 2014 work Os memoráveis [The memorable ones] in which a young Portuguese journalist who resides in the United States returns to her country to film a documentary on the Carnation revolution of 1974. What shimmers through is a feeling of deception of the protagonists and the country, a balance of unfulfilled promises four decades after.

The prize will be awarded on November 28, 2020.

There are three older posts on Lídia Jorge from 2017, 2015, and 2014.

SOURCE: FIL Guadalajara; articles by Salinas and Sánchez in “revista v,” El País, August 29, 2020, p. 29 [printed edition]