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.

Life Embitters

Literature & Fiction

Pla, Josep

United States

Archipelago

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.

The Gray Notebook (New York Review Books Classics)

Essays & Correspondence

NYRB Classics

Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

Salt Water

Literary

La inflació alemanya: Cròniques 1923-1924

History

Destino CAT

Ver Cataluña (Spanish Edition)

Europe

Destino

Grandes tipos....DL

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Booket

El cuaderno gris

Genre Fiction

Austral

Lo que hemos comido

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Fin de semana en Nueva York

Ediciones Destino

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Books by Pla, Josep