Salt Water
- 310 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Award-wining literary translator Peter Bush brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers.
Josep Pla Book order
March 8, 1897 – April 23, 1981
Josep Pla was a Catalan journalist and an immensely prolific author, whose style is characterized by simplicity, irony, and clarity. His subjective and colloquial view of the world, which he termed 'anti-literary,' strove to call things by their names, constantly seeking the precise adjective. Pla dedicated his life to writing, evidenced by the 46 volumes of his Complete Works. His liberal-conservative, skeptical, and uncompromising thought, filled with irony and common sense, resonates as contemporary today, establishing him as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
- 2020
- 2015
Life Embitters
- 600 pages
- 21 hours of reading
A book of stories, or "narrations," by the finest Catalan writer of his generation. In this beautiful work, translated into English for the first time, Pla transcribes his witnessings of basic truths: the waves of the sea, the hardness of rolled tobacco. The reader feels tangibly the pleasure with which Pla puts the sensual and real on paper.
- 2013
The Gray Notebook
- 638 pages
- 23 hours of reading
Josep Pla’s masterpiece, The Gray Notebook, is one of the most colorful and unusual works in modern literature. In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor. Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works. It is a beautiful, entrancing, delightful book—at once a distillation of the spirit of youth and the work of a lifetime.