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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...

We all have tombs from which we travel To reach mine I have to get a lift with some strangers to a place in the Catalan Coastal Range I’ll be spending the weekend taking part in a workshop called ‘Live your Death’ The main challenge of this adventure will be to relate my death in the first person, without really dying, I hope In the brochure they talk about us facing things very similar to NDEs (near death experiences), watching the film of our lives, glimpsing the light at the end of the tunnel, having out-of-body experiences and seeing languid and distant little men calling us affectionately from the threshold where it all ends It’s also possible, I think, that I’ll be put on a plane and taken to an island where weird things happen In the meantime I’m getting to know some of my fellow passengers   ‘Did we meet at “Recycling Ourselves”?’ asks the man   No, it was at “My Place in the Universe”,’ she replies   ‘Oh yeah and have you found it?’   ‘Not yet’   ‘After all these workshops you still haven’t found it?’   ‘I’m working on it’   ‘What you need is a clear objective,’ says the man, who despite all the money he’s spent on self-help workshops seems not to have grasped certain basic principles For example, that you don’t greet a woman by asking her if she’s figured out what to do with her shitty life yet I can think of various things to say to them both to solve their problems and earn myself some cash: that he try closing his mouth every now and again and that she tell guys who reckon they know more about her than she does where to go   ‘Well, girls, are you ready?’ This is the man’s second time at the death workshop and he claims to know what he’s talking about   ‘You have to take your clothes off, yeah? Get naked, yes siree’   The woman and I look at each other The man turns around and just speaks to me this time:   ‘You must have good lungs because you’re from over there, down south, people have good lungs there

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

feature

February 2015

A Closer Joan

Shawn Wen

feature

February 2015

Here are a few of the Joans I know. The girl who arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal in...

fiction

January 2014

Vertical Motion

Can Xue

TR. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

fiction

January 2014

We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t...

Art

February 2016

'Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath.'

Alice Hattrick

Art

February 2016

Listen to her. She is telling you about her adolescence. She is telling you about one particular ‘bender’ that...

 

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