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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...

Dor Guez, artist, scholar, photographer, archivist, wants to avoid being classified, but it’s difficult not to fall into the trap As an artist from Israel of mixed Christian Palestinian and Tunisian Jewish origin, whose work disentangles the complex identities which exist within Israel and Palestine, delineation is something he both rejects and encourages   His work uses photographs, archives and films to ask critical questions of the position of Israel’s Christian Palestinian community, who today make up less than 2 per cent of the population Much of his art focuses on his family, particularly his grandparents Ya’qoub and Samira, through whom he tracks the experiences of the generation who lived through the Arab-Israeli War, which began in 1948: the year marked Israel’s declaration of independence, which led to the large scale displacement of Palestinians from their homes Guez uses archival photograph collections to record the steady movement of time passing, and video installations to document banal everyday exchanges, capturing fragments of memory and reflections on identity In the video Subaru-Mercedes (2009), three members of the same family discuss the complexities of self-identifying between Arab, Christian, Israeli, and Palestinian, while in (Sa)Mira (2009) a young Christian Palestinian discusses the subtle racism she’s encountered in Jerusalem Alongside his art work, Guez founded the Christian-Palestinian Archive (CPA) in 2009, the first archive devoted to the Christian-Palestinian minority of the Middle East   With the past month witnessing an increasing number of stabbings, shootings, protests and clashes across Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, Guez’s work takes on added relevance Many of his projects are highly intimate, displaying portraits of the generations who have been witnessing this cycle of violence and dispossession since 1948 Guez seeks to unfold every recent layer of identity within the Christian Palestinian community, contrasting these complexities – and the extraordinary circumstances which come with living in either Israel or Palestine – with people’s often banal everyday routines In Bypass (2014), we see the dirt track, which runs parallel to the concrete wall separating Israel and the West Bank, worn away by the ‘living footsteps of menial existence’ It is a physical

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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Interview

December 2017

Interview with Peter Stamm

Seren Adams

Interview

December 2017

Peter Stamm’s international reputation as a writer of acute psychological perception and meticulously precise prose has been growing steadily...

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April 2017

Everywhere and Nowhere

Vahni Capildeo

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April 2017

Part of my reluctance to write on citizenship is that as a poet, a worker in delicate, would-be-truthful language,...

Prize Entry

Issue No. 20

The Refugee

Kristen Gleason

Prize Entry

Issue No. 20

Brian Ed waited outside the ration house. Merlijn took his time coming to the door, and opened it slowly....

 

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