Barcelona

Let acclaimed Catalan writer Anna Pazos show you Barcelona beyond the selfies, a city whose beauty has always emerged through argument. “One only has to let Barcelonians talk for a few minutes to glimpse the truth: their critical attitude is a defense mechanism.” Barcelona is a city that has learned, for better and for worse, how to be seen. Once defined by its own rhythms, it now evolves under constant observation and patronage by visitors from around the world—to the perpetual chagrin of Barcelonians. Anna Pazos is a Barcelonian, no two ways about it: so skeptical of the city’s tourist influx that she’s never visited the Sagrada Familia, even though she lives just a block away. But in accepting the challenge to write about her hometown, the better to reconcile newcomers and locals, she discovers a deep well of affection for it, an appreciation of the way the twists and turns of its history have only made it more expansively, beguilingly itself. Candid and urbane, Barcelona is a lesson in how centuries of upheaval—empires and epidemics and wars, fascist dictatorship and linguistic schism, Art Nouveau and the Olympics—have shaped the present of a city that is at once majestic and garish and irrepressibly alive. Translated from the Catalan by Paul Sánchez Keighley About TRAVEL WITH A WRITER Travel with a Writer begins with a simple idea: places become more interesting in the company of someone who knows them well. The series brings readers together with bestselling, award-winning, and acclaimed writers in places they know intimately. Some will already be familiar to English-language readers. Others are major literary voices in their own countries and regions whom we are delighted to introduce in English. At a time when information about where to go has never been easier to find, these books offer something harder to access: somebody else’s way of seeing a city. They invite readers to experience it like a local by entering it through the memories, observations, and imagination of a writer who has called it home. Literature has always allowed us to spend time inside another life. Travel with a Writer brings that literary intimacy to place. We give every writer the same invitation: write a short narrative about a place you have called home, for the would-be traveler. We choose writers whose work we admire and trust their instincts about how best to bring a place to life. What each writer makes of the invitation is entirely their own. Original writing is accompanied by curated walks, maps, infographics, and cultural recommendations, allowing readers who do travel to follow the writer’s perspective off the page and into the place itself. Read a book before a trip, carry it through a city, return to it after coming home, or travel entirely from home. Author by author, place by place, a global literary atlas takes shape. In 2027 and beyond, the series will continue to expand with acclaimed writers taking readers inside cities around the world, with forthcoming and developing titles including Chicago with Rebecca Makkai, Bogota with Santiago Gamboa, Berlin with Norman Ohler, Athens with Amanda Michalopoulou, Lisbon with Gonçalo Tavares, Buenos Aires with Martín Caparrós, Vancouver with Ian Williams, Hanoi with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Taipei with Michelle Kuo. About THE WALKING TREE Founded in French in March 2025 as L’arbre qui marche by former journalists and editors Nadia Krovnikoff and François Saugier, The Walking Tree is an independent publishing house devoted to new ways of writing about place. Travel with a Writer has expanded internationally, with editions now available in French, Italian, and Spanish. Its U.S. and UK publishing program, The Walking Tree, is led by Kristina Kearns, former executive and editorial director of McSweeney’s and operations director of Fitzcarraldo Editions, with Daniel Levin Becker, former literary and features editor of The Believer