In an old café in a town set into the steep bank of the river Ebre, an attentive local chronicler gathers tales from his peculiar, sardonic neighbours building an anthology of stories fi lled with humour and social criticism. They are populated by a succession of weird and wonderful characters including a home-grown Sisyphus, an unlucky vocational criminal, some extremely committed fans of the local football team, a peasant who is too fond of his neighbour’s property, a police informer who gets beaten up in every dark corner, a former boatman who’d like to take up his calling again in the next life (from the side of the dead), and a crime novel aficionado too clever for his own good.
One of the most translated Catalan authors.
El cafè de la granota, the second collection of stories by Jesús Moncada, originally published in 1985, contains fourteen stories set in the old town of Mequinensa, a world the writer invented himself.
A recreation, somewhere between realism and fantasy, of the mythical past of an old town
now submerged beneath the waters of the river Ebre.
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