Two decades of asteroids

Asteroids are familiar bodies, smaller than planets, but equally dependent on our Sun. I suppose Luis Solano was unaware, twenty years ago, that the name of his publishing house would eventually encapsulate both his identity and his essence. Because many of us readers have adopted as our own not only works, but also poetics that were already part of our solar systems, but which, with their incorporation into Libros del Asteroide, ceased to be meteorites and became companion orbits.

This is the case of British author Rachel Cusk, who had already published several novels in Spain before dazzling us last decade with her autofiction trilogy A contraluz (Backlight), Tránsito (Transit) , and Prestigio ('that the narrative impulse could arise from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need—as was generally assumed—to make sense of things; in other words, that it was a calculated strategy to absolve ourselves of responsibility'), after which we can no longer imagine her in any other catalogue. Or that of Eduardo Halfon, whom we have read through various publishers, but whose core is now gathered in Asteroide. This series of supposedly autobiographical books that address family histories, always seeking distinct formal strategies, although they are also united by the self, with the insistent desire to demonstrate that identity is a fiction. 'My Lebanese grandfather was not Lebanese,' we read in Canción (Song); and of his Polish grandfather, he says in Duelo that as a child “he told me that the number tattooed on his left forearm (69752) was his phone number, and that he had tattooed it there so he wouldn't forget it.”

Luis Solano's publishing house is joining the renewal of publishing in our country.

To counterbalance the importance of the novel in the catalogue, the Non-Fiction Prize was created five years ago, and has since been won by Llucia Ramis, Solange Levinton, Rebeca Yanke, Paco Cerdà, David Jiménez Torres, Andrés Cota Hiriart, and Ricardo Dudda. But it's not just the living that count; there are also long-dead classics that we now associate primarily with Luis Solano's imprint: Manuel Chaves Nogales (with his Complete Works in Five Volumes), Agota Kristof (Claus and Lucas, that masterpiece), and even Graham Greene (The End of the Affair, The Reverse of the Plot , and Brighton Rock, reissued so many years after their first Spanish editions).

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Its asteroid is part of a belt called Contexto, along with other related projects that were also born at the beginning of this century (Nórdica, Impedimenta, Periférica, Sexto Piso), which is part of a larger framework, that of the great renewal of publishing in our country, also promoted since independence by Alpha Decay, Candaya, Minúscula, Galaxia Gutenberg, Páginas de Espuma, Errata Naturae or Blackie Books. It is impossible to think of bookstores, our libraries, without their bets, their discoveries, their rescues, their constellations.