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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...

  MODES OF BEING   A new hobby of mine is repeating a word until it strays from its centre of meaning, so risibly            alive (an egg tumbling through grass) unburdened of itself, beyond thinking I lead a rich and duplicitous life on the ward I’m fed well All the residents know me, their cherubic faces assuaging my fears in the midst of some sinister music   I’m happy enough letting the television play, allowing sunlight its languorous dominion   In the cool phosphorescence of these bus stop days (my dust rising and returning) comes feeling       CRYPSIS   Stop the gunboats! Lately I’m relishing being a strange fungus in the meaning of the hall unmolested, my brain a razed monastery of thoughts a prized gourd at the funeral of verbs   I’ve only growth as a means of mobility Here beneath the smashed, chaotic flagstones a specious beach   bestrewn with slogans, garbled soundbites cracked versions of ourselves exhumed in sunlight in a tableau of what’s real   What to tell you? That it’s enough to make beautiful things to love redly despite the expiry date of dogs   That the mind blooms serenely, in virtue of itself: a feted puffball   of which these poems are the spores       THREE OR FOUR HILLS AND A CLOUD   Morning Time to crank up the machine without which this wouldn’t be possible   (You gesture towards some tangerines, a laptop, a fresh pot of coffee)   This still life cannot excite me today, will not sate nor diminish this longing to escape this life for jungle scenes to play swingball with vigour, meet monkeys   Bad example, but you know what I mean about torpor, the bureaucrat’s burden, so often fishing in stagnant pools when each door opens onto salvation   In the next life (whoever you are) I’ll be good, like the spring, if not better I’ll wade out into flowerful fields and disappear I’ll see you tomorrow  

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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poetry

June 2015

Hotel

Mónica de la Torre

poetry

June 2015

Hotel   The housekeeper has children living in town with her but her husband and relatives are in Somalia....

fiction

December 2011

Travel

Paul Kavanagh

fiction

December 2011

Taxi The taxi stopped and Henry climbed into the taxi. The taxi driver went around the block three times...

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January 2012

The Common Sense Cosmos

Ned Beauman

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January 2012

Worthwhile philosophy is like building matchstick galleons. When Lewis says that all possible worlds are just as real as...

 

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