This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The lecturer tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy. Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marse, our narrator...
This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delive...
Tancredo, a young hunchback, observes and participates in the rites at the Catholic church where he lives under the care of Father Almida. Also in residence are the sexton Celeste Machado, his goddaughter Sabina Cruz, and three widows known collectively as the Lilias, who do the cooking and cleaning and provide charity meals for the local poor and needy. One Thursday, Father Almida and the sexton must rush off to meet the parish s principal benefactor, Don Justiniano. It will be the first time in forty years Father Almida has not said mass. Eventually they find a replacement: Father...
Tancredo, a young hunchback, observes and participates in the rites at the Catholic church where he lives under the care of Father Almida. Also in res...
One night, a renowned and now retired literary publisher has a vivid dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he s never visited. The central scene of the dream is a funeral in the era of Ulysses. The publisher would give anything to know if an unidentified character in his dream is the great author he always wanted to meet, or the ghostly angel who abandoned him during childhood. As the days go by, he will come to understand that his vision of the end of an era was prophetic.
Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey that connects the worlds of Joyce and Beckett, revealing the...
One night, a renowned and now retired literary publisher has a vivid dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he s never visited. The central scene...
An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short history of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of portable literature. The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico Garcia Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness...
An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short history of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of portable ...
In the late 1970s, as Spain was adrift between the death of Franco and the rebirth of democracy, people were moving from the poor south to the cities of the north in search of a better life. But the work, when there was any, was poorly paid and the housing squalid. Out of this world of limited opportunities a generation of delinquents arose whose prospects were stifled and whose rebellion would be brief and violent...One summer's day in Gerona a bespectacled, sixteen-year-old Ignacio Canas, known to his few friends as Gafitas, is working in an amusement arcade, when a charismatic teenager...
In the late 1970s, as Spain was adrift between the death of Franco and the rebirth of democracy, people were moving from the poor south to the cities ...
An extraordinarily rich and powerful collection of seven, thematically linked stories from the acclaimed prize-winning author of The Sound of Things Falling 'The narrative escalates, the mystery deepens, and the scope of the story widens with each page ... Terrific' Khaled Hosseini, Books of the Year 'One of the most original new writers of Latin American literature' Mario Vargas Llosa A Colombian writer is witness to a murder which will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return, while he lies in another woman’s bed twenty kilometres away....
An extraordinarily rich and powerful collection of seven, thematically linked stories from the acclaimed prize-winning author of The Sound of Things F...
