Mailing List


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

feature

Issue No. 13

Enrique Vila-Matas

TR. J. S. Tennant

feature

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...

Proposition: The limits of our social imaginaries mean the limits of our worlds   1 Perhaps new forms of being require new forms of relationship   11 What is being anyway but gesturing towards an indefinite assembly of unknowable qualities & quantities   12 Categories of being are obstructive & injurious both to those who touch the social imaginary & those who don’t   13 Categories of literature are obstructive & injurious both to those who read it & those who write it   14 Concepts like ‘genre’ & ‘style’ are made-up words   15 Concepts like ‘female’ & ‘male’ are made-up words   16 New forms of being require new forms of thought, such as “that the distinctions between the beautiful and ugly, if made at all, [be] made arbitrarily”[1]   17 I have finally been turned on in the sense that “[i]f one of my works were to be turned on it would destroy itself”[2]   18 Perhaps the attempt to acquire reality through anti-illustrational action is the only meaningful endeavour   19 Francis Bacon says of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (c1659):   If you analyse it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks[3]   110 Perhaps belief in the necessity of sacrifice is the utmost achievement for all people at all times    111 Gabrielle Civil says:   Art of all kinds is not just the practice of making, it’s the practice of being in the world a certain way It’s a certain susceptibility, and it’s also sacrifice – the offering up of everything with only a few strings attached[4]   112 Perhaps being arrives through a sustained engagement with the act of thinking as embodied practice   113 If being requires a theatre of the social imaginary do we, the audience, bear responsibility for being’s staging   114 If gender is a “variable cultural interpretation of sex” perhaps our facility to intervene in gender’s [being’s] context(s) is likewise mutable & indefinite[5]   115 What is the difference between you & the thing that eats you – is it the fact

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

feature

Issue No. 9

Enrique Vila-Matas

feature

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...

READ NEXT

Prize Entry

April 2015

Smote, or ...

Eley Williams

Prize Entry

April 2015

To kiss you should not involve such fear of imprecision. I shouldn’t mind about the gallery attendant. He is...

Interview

November 2012

Interview with Simon Critchley

John Douglas Millar

Interview

November 2012

Over the last twenty years Simon Critchley has produced a series of elegant works of political and cultural theory....

fiction

January 2013

Animalinside

László Krasznahorkai

Max Neumann

TR. Ottilie Mulzet

fiction

January 2013

IV     Every space is too tight for me. I move around, I jump, I fling myself and...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required