Pankaj Mishra’s book recommendations. Very happy to find references to the English translations of Mercè Rodoreda’s La plaça del diamant (as a book hardly any reader in English has heard of) and Josep Pla’s El quadern gris (as “a hypnotic record of the author’s life in the Catalan provinces and Barcelona in the first half of the 20th century, and I found myself wishing this very long book to go on forever”).