Let's start at home, that space that we have abused in recent years. Because we've also been inaccessible to the street and isolated, separated. It was not easy. Many of us have been moved inside; many of us have also been torn apart. Consequently, we may have some awareness of the importance of mental health, but we still have a lot to talk about. And books are always good comrades to start the conversation.

Iñigo Antsorregi started feeling sad and tired before the pandemic, in 2019. Fatigue was not only physical, but also emotional. And from a moment on, it wasn't fatigue, it became pain. Inside he broke something: he got suicidal thoughts. After three years of intense work, he leaves that hole, but he tells what he experienced in the autobiographical essay Elkar, at home of my pain. And it's to be welcomed that he's done it, because it can serve many people who may be in a similar situation, so that they realize that they're not alone, and that it's possible to get out of that darkness. “If one person feels conscious, it has been worth it,” Antsorregi explained in the book presentation.

Another issue that appears little, and with many reservations, is prostitution. Juno Mac and Molly Smith are authors of the book Puta zikinak (Katakrak). They came to prostitution after finishing their studies and going through underpaid jobs. This experience also changed politically as it approached from liberal feminism to communist positions. Sex Worker is currently a member of the Advocacy and Resistence Movement (SWARM).

Amaia Astobiza Uriarte translated this essay into Basque focused on the fight for the rights of sex workers from English. It is a book that invites us to think through Mac and Smith about masculinity, social class or the use of the body in relation to prostitution. “Sex work is an agreed chamber in which society retains its most serious fears and concerns,” the authors say in this text that it may be appropriate to start breaking taboos.

Are we talking about masculinity in the previous paragraph? Masculinity has been mentioned in the paragraph. Well, to think a lot about it, it's been published not long ago. Masculinities (Elkar), R.W. by Australian sociologist Connell, translated by Ane García López. The last contribution of the Eskafandra collection, launched six years ago by Elkar and Jakin, is that, guided by the intention to offer in Basque feminist thought reference works, in this section some of the most significant works by Angela Davis, Silvia Federici, Judith Butler or Simone de Beauvoir have been published in recent years.

As for Connell's work, it is a book that can give many answers and reflections to a question, what is the place of men in the fight for gender equality? Among others, this work is attributed to the first use of the concept of “hegemonic masculinity”. The sociologist analyzes how this main model of virility has been modified and redefined throughout history, which has given much to talk about in this work since its first publication in 1995.

Leire Milikua is also an essay capable of breaking stereotypes about Earth, under the shadow (Susa) of Larramendi. This work, published in the framework of the feminist collection Lisipe of the Zarauztarra publishing house, collects the voices of the baserritarras women, from which she has made a diagnosis of the situation of the cultivating women. The reader will know a triple subalternity: women, peasants and rural, in a patriarchal, capitalist and urban world, and in the Basque Country.

This program, written with great rigor and capacity for synthesis, which has 120 pages to open a whole world hidden from the reader, believes that it will surprise more than one, the author of the prologue Josebe Blanco Álvarez: “You will be surprised by the data and reflections or questions Leire Milikua asks us about them, as well as the realities that hide the data in different layers. Perhaps reading leads you to review the rural world and your vision of us, to move your eyes to see us and, perhaps, to look at us to abandon the watchtower.”

Aiora Zabala Aizpururen Natura in our hands (Alberdania) is also a land related test. Editor of the journal Nature Sustainability and Professor at the University of Cambridge (UK), the essay of this Iruness offers some keys to addressing the issue of climate change that is now. The fundamental idea would be that it is possible to think more freely about problems such as the climate emergency and the loss of biodiversity, and therefore to act more creatively on the political decisions to be taken.

The relationship between man and the environment is what Zabala speaks in this short but not in an abstract way: the voice that speaks to us in this book can be the author himself or someone similar; and although it is a complex issue, it is written in an understandable and loving way, alternating dialogical passages, personal experiences or current elements with scientific evidence.

The reader will also find interviews in the book of Agustin Arrieta Urtizberearen Gau eztabaida (Erein). The most classical of classic methods to think about ourselves, has been used since the time of the Socrat conversations to seek some clarity. In any case, the reader will find the current philosophical conversations in the last book of this professor and writer of the UPV.

Four young people attending a congress meet in a small town and, after academic sessions, the dialogue between them wakes up every night. Without losing respect, but everyone with their own vision, in these debates everything will appear: truth, science, religion, love, sexual gender, art, fiction, values, happiness... They're rethinking the world. The two genera that Arrieta has worked on in his trajectory, the fictitious narrative and the essay, are gathered in this work.

We started the article from home. Finally, we've chosen the story of someone who spent many years away from home: Look at Egiguren has spent 46 years outside Euskal Herria, in Venezuela. When he returns from there, all the material goods he owns fit in a shoe box. It is much more what he has left behind, since after years of work in the poorest neighborhood of Caracas he had a whole community. He worked in the setting up of nurseries and schools, organized family workshops, food cooperative, bakery...

Leire Ibarguren's life comes to Petare: In the book Miren Egiguren zatak (Txalaparta). The reader will find, on the one hand, the story of a powerful woman and, on the other, through her experiences, a portrait of a community that, in the most difficult conditions, has found a way to move forward with cooperation.