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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...

I was fourteen when I first transformed from Rosa into ~<*RoSaBubbLe*>~ Propelled by my adoration of Courtney Love – the lead singer of Hole, who I loved for many reasons but especially because she wrote on her stomach in eyeliner – I travelled down my first internet rabbit hole to the forums of the North American feminist magazine, Bust After school, in the living room I shared with my family, I would dwell in this private portal to a different world which could easily be shut on demand (just click the x)   Here, I found other young women, who were negotiating their similar-but-different lives Because of global capitalism we had a lot in common: they too went to Sizzler all-you-can-eat buffet for a treat with their grandparents, they too loved Courtney I didn’t speak (type) much because they all seemed more articulate than I was and because they were from North America and one was even from London, which seemed like centres of the world to me, back then in the suburbs of Sydney I learnt many things on these forums, but two have stuck with me most vividly The first thing I learnt about was zines, a decidedly low-tech cut-n-stick subculture which I readily embraced The second was something called ‘menstruation porn’, which is exactly what it sounds like I visited the slow-to-load webpage of very happy-looking bleeding people naked in the forest only once I think that, while intrigued, I was also repulsed (fully inhabiting the Freudian meaning of ambivalence), or maybe the dial-up cut out or my mum came home from the supermarket But knowing that it was there and being able to turn it over in my mind was enough Desire it seemed, was much more expansive than I had thought How curious In a world where I had already learnt to be frightened of men, the website taught me that they didn’t necessarily always get to determine how sex — and everything else — might go It was a small, quivering thought against the rest of

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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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...

feature

August 2013

The Ghosts of Place

Dylan Trigg

feature

August 2013

 ‘So I turned around for an instant to look at what my field of vision onto the sea had...

Art

Issue No. 4

The Land Art of Julie Brook

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession...

 

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