The key words of contemporary society, seduction, enjoyment, authenticity, and its darkest side, from precariousness to

Rebecca Makkai shows in I Have Some Questions for You (Sexto Piso/Club editor) that the past is not as different from the present as we would like to believe through Bodie Kane, a successful podcast author who returns as a teacher to the elite boarding school where she studied and where a crime occurred that perhaps he knew more about than he thought. At play, social networks, cancel culture, unsurpassed machismo and the mechanisms that build our memory.

And in search of giving meaning to life go the characters of the monumental Los escorpiones (Lumen), by Sara Barquinero, 800 pages with conspiracy theories, subliminal messages that induce suicide, emotional imbalances and a journey that goes from Italy in the 1920s to the deep south of the United States and today’s Spain.

Another journey, in search of the father and the primal power of music in the middle of a lysergic macro-festival at the foot of a volcano in the Andes is the dazzling proposal by Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda in Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun (Random House) , told with a language that transports you to another universe. Like the Chilean Ariel Florencia Richards, who sets out to fictionalize the trans experience in Inacabada (Alfaguara).

And there are many universes, like that of the Asturian Sara Torres, who addresses sexual fantasies and the power of images in desire in Seduction (Reservoir books), starring a young photographer and a writer twenty years older. The British Yomi Adegoke addresses the conflicts of the

Other monsters are those of Icelandic Frisa Ísberg, who points to a dystopian society in Random House with a test that measures levels of empathy to identify potential antisocial behavior. A real dystopia is that of The Pawn on the Board (Salamandra), a classic by Irène Némirovsky that portrays the lights and, above all, the shadows of Paris in the 1930s, mired in a devastating economic crisis.

By the way, literature about animals and with animals is booming, as shown by the Colombian María Ospina Pizano in Just a Bit Here (Random House), with birds that seek their migratory destination despite the city lights, orphaned porcupines and bitches. who take refuge together from their abandonments. Sylvia Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, collects in George (Errata naturae) the diaries of an emotional friendship with a magpie and a crow. And the Japanese Hiro Arikawa returns with more cat stories in The Cat Who Said Goodbye (Lumen).

The great Korean comic creator Keum Suk Gendry-Kim portrays the human need to create bonds in the graphic novel Dogs (Reservoir books). And the biologist Lulu Miller in Fish Don’t Exist (Seix Barral) makes a trip to the 19th century in the midst of a personal crisis to draw lessons for the present through the most important marine biologist of that time.

An uncertain present for which it is not bad to browse essays such as Artificial Civilization (Arpa), by José María Lassalle, a look at the nihilism that drives the current development of artificial intelligence and a commitment to exchanging knowledge for wisdom. On the other hand, Slavoj Zizek, a great shaman of current philosophy, examines in The Plus of Enjoyment (Paidós) the primacy of excessive enjoyment in contemporary capitalist society where nothing is enough. And the always lucid Gilles Lipovetsky addresses in The Consecration of Authenticity (Anagrama) the fetishism of “the authentic” that invades us, from organic to vintage. For her part, Katy Kelleher also talks about desire and consumption in the essays of The Terrible History of Beautiful Things (Alpha Decay). And by Susan Sontag, Debate recovers her essays On women, aging, equality, beauty and sexuality under the gaze of the great essayist.

For those who prefer history, On the Edge of Time (Siruela), by Fernando Wulff, shows the first globalization, the meeting of ideas and objects from China, India and the Greco-Roman world in the Indian Ocean two thousand years ago. And François Dosse traces a monumental history of French philosophy that goes from existentialism to structuralism and the fall of the Wall in The Saga of the French Intellectuals (Akal). In comics, it is impossible not to remember the second and spectacular volume of What I Like Most Are Monsters (Reservoir Books) by Emil Ferris, with the protagonist beginning to discover in the midst of a pantheon of gangsters, hustlers and gang members the greatest mystery of his life: who he is.