This year 2025 has shown that culture is not just an object or an individual experience, but a bridge between people, times and emotions. In the pages of this issue of ABC Cultural, our critics and contributors have carefully selected everything … the best thing that happened this year. From books that reconstruct historical memory to novels that explore the intimate and everyday, including albums, exhibitions and audiovisual proposals, this guide includes the highlights.
In the fiction, 2025 He leaves us titles that combine unmissable rescues and fascinating firsts. The works of Dickens, Cheever and Fowles return to bookstores in new editions, while contemporary authors explore memory, history and family ties. From Barcelona to New York, from Venezuela to Portugal, these books transform space and time into living narrative material. In the following link, the selection of ABC Cultural critics:
In non-fiction, the repetition continues to demonstrate his ability to combine erudition and literary style, offering readings that open new perspectives on history, society and contemporary culture. This year, works that explore everything from power and politics to personal and collective memory stand out.
From the Middle Ages understood as a world in movement until the first globalization after 1492; of the Chinese Cultural Revolution to musical Stalinism; from primitive Buddhism to the Christian foundations of the West; From fashion as a historical language to the deep logic of Hispanic dissidence, these essays draw a plural map of knowledge. In the following link, the selection of ABC Cultural critics:
We also see that they reveal extraordinary lives: from the enigmatic Fernando Pessoa, explored by Richard Zenith with a surgeon’s magnifying glass, to the English Renaissance reconstructed through the scholarly gaze of Stephen Greenblatt, including the intimate notebooks of Olivier Bags and the moving stories of Héctor Abad Faciolince. Literature, in its multiple forms, reminds us that knowing other lives also means learning to live our own with more intensity. In the following link, the selection of ABC Cultural critics:
Contemporary art presents itself as a gift that combines sensitivity aesthetics and reflection deep From Carmela García to Laura F. Gibellini, via Brigitte Szenczi and Juan Antonio Mañas, Día Muñoz or Chus García Fraile, the proposals invite us to inhabit the work, to stop in front of the beauty, the dreamlike and the symbolic. Buying a painting or sculpture ceases to be a simple material act: it becomes an opportunity to open new worlds and new conversations around creativity. In the following link, the selection of ABC Cultural critics:
This year, the books on art and visual thinking brought together in this special confirm that contemporary creation cannot be dissociated from ethics, politics or a critical look about our time. From the essential figure of César Manrique, claimed as an activist artist and ecological conscience ahead of his time, to lucid analyzes of the tensions in contemporary art, these works draw a complex and stimulating map. In the following link, the selection of ABC Cultural critics:
When books have already taken up a good part of this special, it is appropriate to open the focus and remember that art offers other ways of celebrating and giving gifts. From exquisite monographs and unique editions to visits to galleries, collective toasts, street markets creative and exhibitions With a festive (or decidedly irreverent) scent, the artistic ecosystem is active on these dates as a space for meeting, reflection and pleasure. In the following link, the ABC Culturel selection:
Music celebrates so much memory as innovation. This year, the historic reissues of Pink Floyd, The Who, Queen and Neil Young coexist with the classics of Spanish rock and the gems of contemporary music, while the memoirs of artists like Malcolm Scarpa or Tony Iommi reveal the most human side of the icons. Concerts, vinyls, books and audio systems become vehicles for sharing emotions and memories. In the following link, the ABC Culturel selection:
Theater reminds us of the magic of the ephemeral, of the living real-time stories. From classics like “Numancia” or “Carmen” to contemporary musicals like “Rent” or “Les Misérables,” each performance is a gift of shared emotion. And in magic or comedy shows, laughter and surprise consolidate theater as an experience that remains in the memory long after the curtain goes down. In the following link, the ABC Culturel selection:
Finally, series and audiovisual entertainment allow you to travel with your imagination. “Stranger Things”, “Rick and Morty” or Blu-ray classics like “Friends” and “Mad Men” connect us to distant worlds and personal memories, while games and associated merchandising transform culture into an interactive universe. Give these experiences as gifts is to offer hours of discovery and pleasure. In the following link, the ABC Culturel selection:
The cinema has become an intergenerational refuge where both the invisible friend in his forties and the digital natives who no longer know how to choose their toys without help can adapt. This special offers a curated journey of movie-loving ideas that range from the tangible to the digital and culminate in the best possible experience: the movie theater. Figures, games, objects to set up a home cinema, physical editions for collectors and, of course, the possibility of offering something as simple and necessary as a ticket or a shared session. In the following link, the selection of ABC Cultura
In short, this issue celebrates the richness of culture in all its dimensions. Books that illuminate the mind, music that touches the soul, works of art that stop time, theater that vibrates with the audience and series that expand the imagination: a catalog of gifts that are not just bought, but experienced, shared and remain in the memory well beyond this Christmas.
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