Daniel Olivella Knihy

Catalan cuisine authority Daniel Olivella serves historical narratives alongside 80 carefully curated Spanish food recipes, like tapas, paella, and seafood, that are simple and fresh. In proud, vibrant Catalonia, food is what brings people together—whether neighbors, family, or visitors. By the sea, over a glass of chilled vermouth and the din of happily shared, homemade Pica Pica (tapas) is where you’ll find the most authentic Catalonia. The region is known for its wildly diverse indigenous ingredients, from seafood to jamon Ibérico to strains of rice, and richly flavored cuisine that has remained uniquely Catalan throughout its complex and fraught history. In Catalan Food, the recipes are intended to be cooked leisurely and with love—the Catalan way. Featuring traditional dishes like Paella Barcelonata (Seafood Paella) and Llom de Porc Canari (Slow-roasted Pork Loin), as well as inventive takes on classics like Tiradito amb Escalivada (Spanish Sashimi with Roasted Vegetable Purees) and Amanida de Tomàquet amb Formatge de Cabra (Texas Peach and Tomato Salad with Goat Cheese), Catalan Food brings heritage into any home cook’s kitchen, where Catalonia’s cuisine was born. To know a culture, you must taste it; none is more rich and stunningly delicious than Catalonia’s.

What grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique. Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical "grounds" through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel's grounds.