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Enrique Vila-Matas
Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His works include Bartleby & Co, Montano, Never Any End to Paris, The Vertical Journey, winner of the Premio Romulo Gallegos, and Dublinesque, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. 'February 2008' is an excerpt from his novel Dietario Voluble, published by Anagrama in 2008.

Articles Available Online


Writers from the Old Days

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Issue No. 13

Enrique Vila-Matas

TR. J. S. Tennant

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Issue No. 13

Augusto Monterroso wrote that sooner or later the Latin American writer faces three possible fates: exile, imprisonment or burial.   I met Roberto Bolaño...

poetry

January 2015

Litanies of an Audacious Rosary

Enrique Vila-Matas

TR. Rosalind Harvey

poetry

January 2015

FEBRUARY 2008   * I’m outraged, but I’ve learned a way of reasoning that quickly defuses my exasperation. This...

It was not only avoiding thoughts of home that helped the good sniper to carry out his mission as he lay on the roof of a building in Tulkarem It was not only the disconnection from his mother, that not thinking about her constituted a kind of rest for him Sniper number two, Hai-Ad Gonen, had given him a bit of cocaine earlier, and Dael could already feel its blessed effects Dael Gruber, who all the guys in the army and in civilian life called Gruber due to the difficulty in pronouncing the two vowels one after the other, was regarded by his friends as a sensitive sniper with a delicate soul And indeed, he was an example to contradict what people generally say about snipers in armies, that they detach themselves from feelings and simply say to themselves, ‘Someone has to do the job,’ and execute their task with cold-blooded composure   This was a sweeping generalisation, and it didn’t apply to Dael Dael went for it in a big way, in other words he shot to kill, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked for him It’s a question of psychological makeup Sometimes it was a little hard for him to shoot at a concrete target, but then he concentrated and took targets from his life instead and set them up in his imagination in the place of the wanted man In many cases he imagined the father of Moran Eliot, his girlfriend when he was at the end of the eleventh grade, when she was at the end of the twelfth grade   Moran Eliot was his first love It lasted for June–July–August and half of September Moran was his first, but he wasn’t her first, and she said that after the first it didn’t matter anymore what number he was It ended badly between them, and with hindsight he didn’t care Her father was in his sights because he threw Dael out of the house in the most humiliating way, after Moran didn’t want to see him and called him a

Contributor

August 2014

Enrique Vila-Matas

Contributor

August 2014

Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His works include Bartleby & Co, Montano, Never Any End to...

Leaving Theories Behind

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Issue No. 9

Enrique Vila-Matas

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Issue No. 9

I. I went to Lyon because an organisation called Villa Fondebrider invited me to give a talk on the relationship between fiction and reality as...

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Interview

July 2013

Interview with Paul Muldoon

Alice Whitwham

Interview

July 2013

A major figure in English-language poetry for decades, Paul Muldoon has enjoyed one of the most successful careers of...

fiction

October 2013

Last Supper in Seduction City

Álvaro Enrigue

TR. Brendan Riley

fiction

October 2013

 ‘. . . and the siege dissolved to peace, and the horsemen all rode down in sight of the...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Remain

Ed Lately

Prize Entry

April 2017

The apology had been the most charged and contested gesture between us, the common element in arguments whose subjects...

 

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