"Josep Pla is famed for the depth and fluidity of his prose. Layered, nuanced and with an enticing elegance of expression, his discourse lures the reader away from the profundity of the speculation towards the elegance of the style. This 'deceivingly simple' author is notoriously slippery. There are many Plas hiding behind the richness of the journalistic prose; and rarely has this polyfacetic dimension been so perceptively exposed as by Resina's penetrating and perceptive monograph. The elusive obliqueness of this transnational itinerant, whose repertoire covers the entire intellectual, academic and vital spectrum, requires an academic sleuth of the sensitivity of fellow-Catalan Resina to elucidate the enormity of the ethical and ideological machinations which rumble in the depths of Pla's chronicle. This is a brilliant study on a brilliantly astute writer." -- Domenic Keown, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge "Josep Pla is an excellent piece of scholarship. Joan Ramon Resina provides an effective introduction of Josep Pla's literary oeuvre to English-speaking audiences while at the same time offering a brilliant re-examination of the significance and meaning of his work." -- Edgar Illas, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University

Josep Pla is Catalonia’s foremost twentieth-century prose writer. He witnessed and wrote about some of the twentieth-century’s most notable events including the Spanish Civil War and the foundation of the state of Israel. Due to a lack of translations of his work he is only now being discovered by the international audience and will soon join the ranks of major realist writers in world literature.

In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer’s deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual. Resina condenses Pla’s forty-seven volumes of work, including travel books, narrative fiction, and history, into eleven thematic units: including time, memory, perception, life, religion, metaphysics, utopia, and self-delusion. Resina acutely explores the writer’s authorial gaze and invites the reader to see the world through the eyes of one of the most underappreciated observers and writers of the twentieth-century.