Jarales / Jarabo: the rural-bourgeois patron in two Iberian novels
An asymmetric comparison of Camilo JosĂŠ Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte and Layla MartĂnez's Carcoma (2021).
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The house that keeps the books: on Layla MartĂnez's Carcoma
MartĂnez's house does not haunt. It accounts.
What the Animals Know: On Violaine BÊrot's Comme des bêtes
What I found in this book, and was not quite expecting, is that the question of margin and norm is not posed abstractly. It is posed through the body.
The Grey Service: Philippe Collin's The Barman of the Ritz
Every Sidecar mixed to Meier's specifications is a kind of unconscious memorial to the fact that beauty has no politics, or rather that it is indifferent to them, and this indifference has always been beauty's most troubling quality.
Silence as Grammar: On Claudia Durastantiâs La Straniera
La Straniera is not a linear memoir of migration, but a constellation of scenes where language fails, doubles back, or invents itself on the spot.
đ´ Viewpoint: The Delegation Threshold
When AI Stopped Waiting for Instructions
Favourite Albums 2025
(Some of) My album choices from 2025
đ´Â Viewpoint: The Machineâs Tempo
We are transitioning, with breathtaking and heartbreaking speed, from a species that contemplates to a species that merely processes.
NeXus #0006
The weekly supplement for extra goodies.
The Bridge on the Drina: A Chronicle Etched in Stone and Time
Elegant, resilient, scarred by time and conflict, yet still standing.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Reflections on BenjamĂn Labatut's 'When We Cease to Understand the World'
NeXus #0005
The weekly supplement for extra goodies.
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In the Fog with Karen
Reflections on Memory, Identity, and the Mysteries We Carry
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đ´Â Viewpoint: How Cities Reshape the Soul
A Journey Through Stone and Self
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Bearing Witness to a Poisoned Inheritance: Isabela Figueiredo's Notebook of Colonial Memories
A work of such unflinching honesty, such controlled fury, that reading it feels less like turning pages and more like bearing witness to an exorcism.
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Finding Eternal Connection: A Journey Through "Watching Over Her" by Jean-Baptiste Andrea
In the words that Jean-Baptiste Andrea has given us through Mimo and Viola, we find an invitation to examine how we watch over those we love, and how, in turn, we allow ourselves to be watched overâseen, protected, and celebrated despite our imperfections.
Digital Age
đ´Â Viewpoint: The Velvet Prison
An Architecture of Voluntary Captivity in the Digital Age
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đ´Â Viewpoint: The Art of Thinking in an Age of Information Abundance
Why Critical Thinking Has Become Our Most Essential Survival Skill
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Adrift in Barcelona: Unpacking Manuel VĂĄzquez MontalbĂĄn's Southern Seas
It transcends genre conventions, using the framework of a detective investigation to offer what MontalbĂĄn aimed for across the series: a "moral chronicle" of Spain's tumultuous TransiciĂłn, the period of transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s.
Viewpoint
đ´Â Viewpoint: Viewpoint: Can AI Truly Understand Us?
Can AI comprehend who a person is, beyond simply processing what they say?
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đ´Â Viewpoint: Tolkien's Legendarium - Lessons in Narrative, Lore, and Lifelong Re-reading
There exists a peculiar alchemy in the way certain literary worlds seize not just our attention, but our very soulâand Tolkien's Middle-earth has been, for me, such a transformative landscape.
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đ´Â Viewpoint: Finding Meaning in the Muddle - Why Philosophical Fiction Speaks to Our Uncertain Times
There are moments, often arriving unbidden during times of collective unease or personal crossroads, when the stories we turn to feel less like escape and more like engagement.
Nexus
NeXus #0004
The weekly supplement for extra goodies.
Viewpoint
đ´Â Viewpoint: 7 Sci-Fi Novels That Teach Us About Being Human in the Age of AI
Seven remarkable science fiction novels that have shaped my understanding of the complex dance between humans and artificial intelligence.