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...

  ARTICULATION OF SOLACE FOR W   We are mothering ourselves We are articulating solace for each other We are trying   to not fall in love Write love poems   to not fall in love   The faultline between the language of feeling and the language of catastrophe? We find it Our common language Our white world We are trying   to write close to it Even closer Closeness   changes Every poem was once impossible   Medieval torture devices Phalansteries That’s when it mattered That’s when you wrote it   Your father’s car speeds up the mountain like an unsent letter and you see someone dead   in your dream when he is still alive outside it, watching Kurosawa for you Aliveness   changes The kind   of violence that can be taken back The room   where someone not deadly realized they could care for you and didn’t Or did Now you imagine it emptied The kitchen   without a sink, windswept, glazed emerald-gold   You could picture solace only by bright walls, you said By, not in A nearness   We were listening to Arca together   We were dreaming about an apartment in the Mesozoic A meadow on Neptune   Thinking This relationship Between the cold pomegranates on the table and the porcelain bowl that couldn’t break apart one morning Solace I   wanted islands instead of worlds I wanted a new kind of ice One to hold on to, lying in bed at noon Bitter citrus grafting   like lightning onto my neck so I could be orchards as well As well   as seeds   of thunderstorms   What’s the point of time if we’re never out of it, knocking at your door, in landfall, in someone else’s house   I wanted we, in the second person I wanted unimaginable solace, in the second person   I wanted terrifying friends   to love me You,   carrying away gorgeous bags of treasure every time we meet Deadlight Clearly we were not who we were Clearly we were not dead We were not   mistaken I wanted to look exactly like you   (after Jenny Hval)   *   HERZZEIT   I

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

fiction

Issue No. 6

Stolen Luck

Helen DeWitt

fiction

Issue No. 6

Keith was not the songwriter. Darren and Stewart wrote the songs. Keith hit things, some of which were drums....

feature

June 2017

Oberhausen Film Festival

Tom Overton

feature

June 2017

Such film festivals – those extraordinary clusters of images, transports of light, of virtual worlds scattered across a real...

fiction

Issue No. 3

Fifteen Flowers

Federico Falco

TR. Janet Hendrickson

fiction

Issue No. 3

To Lilia Lardone Summer was ending. The air already smelled like smoke, but it still looked clear, sunny. The...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required