The Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 2008

Fülszöveg

GUEST EDITOR'S NOTE
Having been asked to compile an anthology of contemporary Catalan stories, and one that already had a fairly definitive and defining proposed title (New Catalan Fiction), I would like to set out in writing some of the basic criteria on which I have based my task—and my choice—as editor.*
Firstly, I wanted to remain faithful to the idea of the present and the idea of the story. Fidelity to the story as a sub-genre (and more specifically to the short story, given the number of pages available) has meant leaving out such great twentieth-century writers of prose as Josep Pla and Josep Maria de Sagarra, who are not well-known as storytellers, and also some of my favorite younger writers (Lolita Bosch, Joan-Lluís Lluis) who do not tend to write the kind of short story included here. On the other hand, and in spite of my desire to respect the contemporary nature of the collection, I neither wanted nor was able to dispense with a kind of introduction (the first part,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

GUEST EDITOR'S NOTE
Having been asked to compile an anthology of contemporary Catalan stories, and one that already had a fairly definitive and defining proposed title (New Catalan Fiction), I would like to set out in writing some of the basic criteria on which I have based my task—and my choice—as editor.*
Firstly, I wanted to remain faithful to the idea of the present and the idea of the story. Fidelity to the story as a sub-genre (and more specifically to the short story, given the number of pages available) has meant leaving out such great twentieth-century writers of prose as Josep Pla and Josep Maria de Sagarra, who are not well-known as storytellers, and also some of my favorite younger writers (Lolita Bosch, Joan-Lluís Lluis) who do not tend to write the kind of short story included here. On the other hand, and in spite of my desire to respect the contemporary nature of the collection, I neither wanted nor was able to dispense with a kind of introduction (the first part, entitled "Then") including five pieces by classical authors that have already come to represent the rich Catalan literary tradition in which our present day story-writers have grown and been influenced (in addition to the immense ocean of all the other literature from around the world). "Then" contains stories by Mercé Rodoreda, Pere Calders, Salvador Espriu, Jordi Sarsanedas and Jesús Moneada, and it could equally have included works by M. Angels Anglada, Víctor Catalá, Ernest Martínez-Ferrando, Terenci Moix, Joan Perucho, Montserrat Roig or Joaquim Ruyra. But it was important to keep this part brief in order to pass the baton to some of the most recent names in contemporary Catalan writing.
In the second part, under the title "And Now," some of the most recent Catalan stories (almost all of them published in the last ten years) are represented by fifteen authors in a wide range of subjects and styles. The section begins with a handful of seniors: Quim Monzó, Maria Barbal and Mercé Ibarz (who could also have been accompanied by Jaume Cabré, Biel Mesquida, Baltasar Porcel, Carme Riera or Emili Teixidor), and continues—in chronological order of the authors' dates of birth—with a dozen writers under the age of fifty in whose hands, I am convinced, lies the future of the genre in
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