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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 I see your picture for the first time two summers ago, sometime in early July I am scrolling through Facebook, my forearms hurting from spending too much time at the computer, when I chance upon a picture of you with your arm around a girl I recognise from my time at art school I am taken by your face, the top half of which is covered by a pair of sunglasses, the bottom with a thick moustache You are wearing a full sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of headphones hang casually around your notably broad neck I can’t be sure given the fuzzy background, but it looks like you are standing in the middle of a busy marketplace ‘OMG full lowwww!’ someone comments beneath the picture ‘Full loweeeee1 is right!’ you reply Based on the delight on the girl’s face as she looks up at you, delirious from your attention, I assume a romantic bond I am jealous of her happiness, of her ability to hold you and look at you the way she does, in a way that I imagine I will never be able to I remember first encountering your photograph while sitting in my bedroom in my old family house in West Delhi, by the window overlooking the large sports complex with the cricket field and newly built swimming pool But this cannot be right Your photograph was uploaded on 2 July, 2016, well after my parents and I had relocated to their current house in North Delhi, in late 2013 I remember the first time I saw a series of pornographic magazines was in that old house, on a summer’s day in August 1995 Perhaps this is why my memory plays tricks on me, for I have since returned to your picture with the same furtive image-lust That day in ’95 I skipped school, pretending to be sick so that I could re-watch three video cassettes I had found in the TV cupboard some months earlier, none of which were explicit per se, but all of which contained a few

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

August 2013

Interview with Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Ben Eastham

Interview

August 2013

Four or so years ago, at what was then the single Peckham establishment to serve a selection of sandwiches...

fiction

March 2014

The Garden of Credit Analyst Filton

Martin Monahan

fiction

March 2014

Ivan Filton had retired early. ‘I have been working a lot on my garden,’ declared Ivan Filton. ‘This is...

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May 2015

In the Light of Ras Tafari

Anna Della Subin

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May 2015

‘A STRANGE NEW FISH EMITS A BLINDING GREEN LIGHT’, the article in National Geographic announced. Off the coast of...

 

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