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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...

1   A mural with a soldier and a worker at its centre Broken tiles on the floor A red star, peeling Angles from the ground, from up high Angles that require crouching and climbing, dirt under fingernails     2   He loves nothing more than a derelict GDR factory, an abandoned asylum An amusement park left to the elements   The weekend comes around and he sets off with his bag of provisions Snacks, a pre-rolled zoot His DSLR with a wide-angle lens, a macro for close-ups     3   I called it ruin porn   That was a mistake   We were sat in a café in Schillerkiez when I said it    First time we’d met    I was flicking through his photos of something abandoned Military hospital? Cement factory?   He grabbed the camera from my hands   Told me, Don’t call it that    I said, What should I call it then?   It’s the thing I love most about this place, about Berlin, he said, eyes fixed on the camera’s LCD screen    The waiter came by, and we watched in silence as he set down our order Two Americanos and a thick slice of mohnkuchen We exchanged dankes and bittes, waited for him to retreat   Aren’t you scared? I asked   Scared of what?   Glass, debris… needles The polizei picking you up?   You go running in Görlitzer park, no?    He paused Looked down at his camera, then back at me, asked: Come with me some time?     4   We got chatting on the app   A late summer evening, Hasenheide park   A sarong for a picnic blanket, a portable speaker on top There was a spliff going round, a bottle of Sekt warmed by the sun   I thought I’d meet him in the bushes once I was tipsy enough But he wanted to chat, exchange pics – not nudes Not just yet   He said he was from Holon, Israel And from the pics that he sent I could tell he was of Yemeni descent   How’d you guess?   Those cheekbones, I typed in response My dad is from Aden Jewish   He’s from Yemen?   From Aden    Haha I thought that was a stereotype    What is?   That the Adenim think that they’re separate    Aden was a country   Was, he replied, with the eye-roll emoji     5   Rollies Negronis Weserstrasse   We met at the bar

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...

READ NEXT

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June 2014

Hoarseness: A Legend of Contemporary Cairo

Youssef Rakha

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June 2014

U. Mubarak It kind of grows out of traffic. The staccato hiss of an exhaust pipe begins to sound like...

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April 2017

Symbols Made Me Hardcore

Joe Bucciero

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April 2017

‘A Sound System, like the property of any system, is the interaction of the sum of its parts.’ —...

Interview

January 2017

Interview with Barbara T. Smith

Ciara Moloney

Interview

January 2017

Californian artist Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931) is something of a performance art legend. It was in the 1960s...

 

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