‘Within the circle of scholars and experts, Gadda is considered a classic of the twentieth century, alongside giants of the international scene such as Proust, Musil, Joyce, Pessoa, Céline, Nabokov, or Beckett’, we are reminded. It is of the great writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, who was born in Milan in 1893 and died in Rome in 1973, as well as his labyrinthine and complex work and its reception that Lucca Mazzocchi writes. Professor at the Universities of Milan and Oxford, Mazzocchi is a specialist in Italian literature of the 20th century, having studied in particular the work of Gadda, an author who exists to be discovered.

Some time ago Pope Francis spoke about homosexuality and his words gave rise to various conflicting remarks. José Manuel dos Santos revisits the Pope’s statement, examining it from a historical perspective that allows us to consider it a symptom of the current state of the Church.

Taking on the labyrinth, the literary critic and art history researcher, João Oliveira Duarte, writes on the vast volume that brings together all the critical work of Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, to which the poet gave a simple descriptive title Poesia Portuguesa Contemporânea [Contemporary Portuguese Poetry].

A person reaches their destination after a long journey and comes across an obstacle. Standing exactly between this person and their becoming, an enormous rock mass, heavy as lead, a skyscraper. It is unsurpassable. The only way to overcome is to summon the prefix trans-, the one that catapults, ignores borders and penetrates into obstacles. The harbinger of metamorphoses.

With this piece, photographers and editors André Príncipe and José Pedro Cortes continue the series conceived for Electra, which began with Hisham Mayet, in Tangier, and continued with Youssef Rakha, in Cairo. This time, they spoke at length with the great French photographer Bernard Plossu, at his home in La Ciotat. Then they took a boat to the island of Corsica. In a conversation that became very intimate, they talked about life, travel, the passion for the desert, the passing of time, photography, photographers, photo books and also the work that Plossu has done in Portugal. At a certain point, Plossu commented: ‘And it's true, good photographers dance. And probably the closest art to photography is neither cinema nor literature, it's dance. A good photographer is graceful.’ Like dance and photography, this conversation is a way of giving people and things movement and light that take them beyond themselves.

Ann Cotten is an Austrian poet and essayist, born in the United States, whose work, recognised for its originality and plurality, has been published by the prestigious German publisher Suhrkamp. Here, the writer introduces us to Steyr, a ‘statutory city’ in Upper Austria, named after one of its two rivers. In understanding the journey to get there, we begin to form a notion of what we are going to find, in a powerful association of nature with historical and cultural memory and with its industrial factory heritage. In this text, in which the impersonal precision of objective information is combined with a personal and subjective look, we are given a portrait of a land that Ann Cotten visited to meet friends who ‘are master skiers and keep a mountain hut for hiking in summer and a chalet for winter sports’.

In conversation with design critic and curator Frederico Duarte, Dutch graphic designer, researcher and professor Ruben Pater talks about his books and his conception of design as a practice of citizenship. This ‘Metropolitan’ is about bringing design closer to the subjects which help us better understand our place and our role in the city (or in the polis).

In this Scoop, we feature twenty-one previously unpublished drawings by Gonçalo Pena. His work, which combines intensity, abundance and movement, both registers the artist’s presence in the world and captures the reflection of the world on the artist himself. These drawings by this fertile creator of images and signs come from one continuous sketchbook. They are exclamations which speak clearly and enigmatically of the Aristotelian three kingdoms of nature: animal, vegetable and mineral. Like marks left in the passing of time, they bear witness to Gonçalo Pena's roving gaze. The imagination behind the images is his way of putting himself on a level with what is happening in the world.

With the title ‘Autobiography and the Novel’, published in Languages of Truth, the British writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie wrote an essay in which intelligence and malice play off each other prompting an inquiry and raising questions that come close to the ones tackled in the ‘Subject’ section of this issue of Electra. The latter also highlights and echoes the confusion that envelops these questions today, swelling like a powerful vortex.

Henry James is a great writer from the turn of the 20th century. An expert in human psychology and a refined stylist, he was the creator of a vast, powerful harbinger work, in which the theme of the meeting-confrontation of Europe with the United States appears insistently. In his work, the subtlety of the mysteries combines with the harshness of the conflicts. Born 180 years ago, his enigmatic personality traits and the surprising events of his life continue to generate enormous curiosity and fascination. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, literary critic and journalist, the renowned Irish writer Colm Tóibín is a devoted connoisseur of James, about whom he wrote The Master, a biographical novel translated into many languages. In this issue of Electra, Tóibín revisits the author of The Portrait of a Lady, to show the importance of houses in James’ life and work. From these, he gives us a picture full of truth and vigour of this tormented genius.