It's curious. I guess there will be more, but I don't remember us: two in one, or a book in two. Take on one side and a cover – with painting in the Pilgrimage of Ramiro Arrue –, a title – Tales euskaldsmile-, an author – Iban Zaldua. You take the other side and the same cover, the same title, but another author – Gerardo Markuleta. A total of eighteen stories written by two hands: the own of each writer. And the title can be very scary at first, if the authors were not Zaldua and Markuleta. With these two, you know that the objective will be that of the most grotesque critical aspects of the Basque, which will never be a happy and loving pleasure of the Basque. This should reassure the reader a great deal.

However, you will surely have a doubt: where to start reading. I also had it: and I decided to start with Zaldua, but the barcode has the cover of Markuleta. Or maybe to extend the pleasure of discovering the narrator Markuleta further -- you know we feel more pleasure when we feel we'll feel it. Zaldua's story is known, and in that sense we could say that it hasn't changed too much since its inception; and if it has changed it has been to sharpen stories further, to take away the surpluses, to bring them to the bones, to make them more effective, better. The author’s own filter can sometimes be the most demanding galbahe – although I would say the most lax of others –. And so, in the autoanthology that Zaldua composed in 2010, we can positively value the inclusion of two stories from this Basque Story – “Liburudenda” and “Zuloarena”–. It seems little in the first blow, but it's 25 percent.

But we still have to discover Markuleta, the storyteller. It is known above all as a poet – although in the most recent translations – with the nickname of Jon Iriberri and with a more proper name. In fact, it is the ten here, as far as I know, the only works he has written in a published book. Obviously, they are different from Zaldua’s stories – they do not seek the reader’s strangeness, the themes are even more focused on some aspects of human relations – but they have a common characteristic: they cause itching, they are uncomfortable, they are not legible. Because, at the end of the day, and as we have mentioned before, these stories entirely Euskaldunes are working in some way against what we call the official Euskaldunity. And that seems to me as good as the winter cold for our health -- literature.