Borja Bagunyà

Recopilación de cuentos de jóvenes autores catalanes.

Lolita Bosch reúne en este libro a 41 autores menores de 45 años que escriben en catalán y se insertan en una tradición común. La obra carece de vocación canónica, presentándose más bien como una biblioteca. O como una búsqueda íntima con la que Lolita Bosch pretende escuchar, descubrir y dialogar con otras voces de su generación. Borja Bagunyà participa con el relato Noche de lunes (Nit de dilluns).

The story brings us closer to the inner universe of morally ambiguous characters who strive to explain themselves. The author exhibits his versatility by giving voice - with equal naturalness - to a teenage girl or a pensioner. The short stories in this work reveal the fallacies and pitfalls with which we mask our public and private discourses. Defensa propia is one of the most promising literary debuts of recent years. Borja Bagunyà has achieved the Mercè Rodoreda prize with work of surprising maturity that dazzles for its strength and imagination.

One cannot make a portrait of a city without knowing the stories of the people that live there, precisely because, among many other things, the city has the worrying capacity to turn people into characters. The city that is discovered in this book is made of selfishness, bitter solitudes, tortured relationships and power struggles. There are also writers incapable of overcoming a first work, suicidal at metros, grandmas who lose their memory and adolescents with extraordinary clarity. Even the terrible story of a family of murderers, the inability to escape memory, the tortuous relationship between a biographer and his biographied and the detailed description of madness will be found. But since the portrait of a whole city is an unattainable task, the eight stories in this collection must be received as the eight notes of the writer's city, a city that joins and separates, defines and contradicts and, like all the great ones, engenders the monsters that occupy the corners. 

Apunts per al retrat d’una ciutat is the extraordinary debut of Borja Bagunyà; a debut written at the age of nineteen and was a finalist of the 2002 Mercè Rodoreda Award.

El psicoanálisis puede ser un infierno. Daniel Bastida quiere ser analista, y va camino de serlo, pero su vocación se tambalea, sacude, y de la sacudida salen dos novelas. En Sesión de control, el hombre llega al abismo de la profesión después de tratar a un erotómano que está convencido de que Franco le quiere. Daniel se siente «llevado»: ¿por qué? En Una casa oscura y un azote, forma parte de un grupo de iluminados por la antipsiquiatría que organizan un viaje lisérgico a Saint-Alban en busca de su gurú. Sesenta y ochoismo en vena. Antes de la escisión, Daniel era el mismo individuo, pero la relación oscura que mantuvo con su hermanastra le acaba partiendo en dos. Porque sí, el psicoanálisis puede ser un infierno.

«¿Que Franco te ama? Estupendísimo, eres el elegido, no hay nadie que te haga sombra alguna a los ojos del dictador infatuado, aunque quizás no hace falta que se lo cuentes a todo el mundo. O ten en cuenta que un tipo con tantas obligaciones, y tantas responsabilidades, no te podrá dedicar mucho tiempo, si es que te puede dedicar nada.»

"Genial. De lectura obligada para psicoanalistas de todo tipo.” Miquel Bassols

2022 Spanish Critic’s Prize, in the Catalan narrative category

Packed with pitiless, corrosive humour, Els angles morts is the confirmation of the enormous talent of one of the most striking and original voices in Catalan fiction.

Sesé and Morella have been married for more than twenty years and understand each other perfectly. Her supervision of an unusual birth while on night duty prompts Sesé, an eminent gynaecologist, to begin to reconsider not only the routine in which she has been trapped for years but also the deeper meaning of medical practice and the motives underlying her own professional work.

At her side, Morella, a cynical lecturer who works at the University of Barcelona, has buried the initial enthusiasm that determined his literary vocation in his youth and now lives stubbornly obsessed with the infighting that goes on among the teaching staff and the political manoeuvring needed to move up in the teaching hierarchy. 

What at first seems like another temporary work crisis, one of the couple's favourite themes when it comes to displaying their rich rhetorical repertoire as they fight the world from the sofa at home, will push the marriage towards an unusual existential crossroads in which something much more important than their future careers is in play: the entire meaning of the years lived and the mark they want to leave with their passing.

“An excellent show of literary strength.” Melcior Comes 

“Borja Bagunya’s first novel exudes bile and genius.” Valèria Gaillard, El Periódico

 “A literary work that tackles the mayor themes of birth, love and death with the disturbing touch of a Michael Haneke.” Vicenç Pagès Jordà, La República 

“Thanks to the similes, the metaphors and the adjectivisation – thanks to literature, Bagunyà works the miracle of drawing the reader into the intensity of human consciousness and linking up the irrational sensations that produce the indescribable reality of things.” Ponç Puigdevall, El País

“A totipotent novel. […] Cathedral-like!" Màrius Serra, La Vanguardia

"The cult hit of this World Book Day." Julià Guillamón, La Vanguardia

“A caustic and brilliant existential cascade” El Temps

“A voracious, yet elegant, critique of the establishment.” Diari de Tarragona

“The dead angles of a brilliant and demanding literature in Catalan…” El Periódico

“Borja Bagunyà shuns comfortable narrative moderation, rejecting the conception of the novel as a simple series of cartoons made with words. […]. Dead Angles is a challenge to read; the reward it offers surpasses the effort.” El País

“The performance is in the how, in how Borja Bagunyà hypnotizes us.” Time Out

"A tribute to Melville. Our 21st-century Moby Dick. A miracle." Jaume C. Pons Alorda

"This is an intelligent novel by an author who is in a league of his own: Bagunyà’s writing is out of this world. And, what’s more, this novel is very fun to read.It stimulates us and keeps us following its intellectual, extreme delirium. Its pacing reminds me of Bernhard. And it has Foster Wallace's postmodern touches.” Time Out

“Consensus and prophecy agree that, for the moment, the novel of the year is Dead Angles by Borja Bagunyà (Periscopi). […] Borja has birthed one heck of a book, a landmark in which freedom of form and fosterwallacism frolic in the service of a furiously-paced story and finely-wrought interior depictions of the characters that are hard to match (the birth scene is one of the best written in contemporary Catalan literature).” El Nacional.cat

In a setting such as the Catalan literary scene, where there is no shortage of authors writing brilliant stories, Plantes d'interior has established Bagunyà as a landmark contemporary storyteller, spearheading a new generation of young talents. 

Plantes d’interior is thirteen short stories (or the same story in thirteen steps. Or a novel that does not know how to behave. Or thirteen variations about something that is not a story nor a novel) about various types of giants, celebrations that do not end, BIG WHITE BLESSINGS, ideal ways to write nothing about Katherine Mansfield, about the problems of feeling exotic, about visionary television series, about the price of putting a price on something, about the impossibility of not betraying certain things, about life in a furniture house, about Japanese lacquer, carnivorous theses, drawings on the floor, the company plants and about this thing to get home and find it too crowded, or too empty, too similar or changed too much and suddenly want to be somewhere else.

The characters in Plantes d’Interior are trapped in environments where they are in crisis: a baby grows to giant size inside a house; a family sees their lives and secrets reflected on a TV series; the members of a residents’ association alter their lives to accommodate what a travel guide has said about them. 

This book consolidates Borja Bagunyà as one of the most unique voices in the new Catalan narrative. 

"The most interesting thing about Plantes d'interior is the tension between physical space and language. There is an emphasis on the strangeness and monstrosity that goes from the first to the last story." Albert Lladó, La Vanguardia

En el episodio del sacrificio de Isaac (Génesis, 22), Dios simplemente dice «¡Abraham!» y Abraham responde «Aquí me tienes». No sabemos nada de la voz de Dios, ni si es una voz interior que el patriarca oye en la cabeza o si le llega resonando desde el cielo. Esta abstracción del mandato tiene unas causas y consecuencias, como todas las formas de dar y recibir órdenes que los humanos hemos concebido durante siglos. A través del análisis de grandes obras de la literatura occidental, y mediante las herramientas de la crítica literaria, el escritor Borja Bagunyà analiza los vínculos entre la realidad y la conciencia y los mecanismos que el hombre ha creado para orientar su acción. La colección Assaltar la Biblia ofrece libros de ensayo sobre temas contemporáneos por medio de la relectura de pasajes bíblicos célebres. Con un estilo fresco, con una mirada humanista y transversal, con el convencimiento de que los textos clásicos son grandes herramientas para pensar en los retos del presente.