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A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
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 ...Show more
Bartleby and Co by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
Marcelo, a clerk in a Barcelona office who might himself have emerged from a novel by Kafka, inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing. He has, in short, become a 'Bartleby', so named after the chara ...Show more
Bartleby and Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
In Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: "I would prefer not to." Addressing such "artists ...Show more
Bartleby and Co by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
In Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: "I would prefer not to." Addressing such "artists ...Show more
Because She Never Asked by Vila-Matas, Enrique, Miles, Valerie
Category: Fiction | Series: New Directions Pearls Ser.
Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work ...Show more
Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
This title is shortlisted for the independent foreign fiction prize. "A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel". (Roberto Bolano). Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety and, looking for dis ...Show more
Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
Samuel Riba is about to turn 60. A successful publisher in Barcelona, he has edited many of his generation's most important authors. But he is increasingly prone to attacks of anxiety - inspired partly by giving up alcohol, and partly by his worries about the future of the book. Looking for distraction, ...Show more
Mac and His Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
Mac over sixty and recently unemployed lives on his wife's earnings from her furniture restoration business. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac's wife, Carmen, a dyslexic born of dyslexic parents, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depr ...Show more
Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas
Category: Fiction
"A virtuoso balletic pas de deux of memory and imagination... There is something reminiscent in the fictional young Vila-Matas of Woody Allen... Not only does this novel glitter with sharp ideas and observations, it may just be the best book I've ever read about Paris." TLS "Utterly compelling...breatht ...Show more