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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...

When not listening to the phone messages of recently deceased children or smearing those killed in stadium disasters, journalists at Britain’s largest-selling newspaper, the Sun, may find time to pen light-hearted satires of modern life One such piece was published in January 2003, depicting a new cast of ‘Mr Men’ characters that best reflect twenty-first century Britain After a handful of readers went to the Press Complaints Commission, failing to see the funny side to ‘Mr Asylum Seeker’, ‘Mr Yardie’, and ‘Mr Albanian Gangster’, a new figure was created just for them, ‘Mr Guardianista’:   He suffers bouts of guilt about the poor and homeless but tries not to let it spoil his holiday at a gîte in Provence Dare support the toppling of Saddam Hussein and he’ll choke on his organic vegetarian lunch (washed down with a subtle Chilean chardonnay) Mr Guardianista is also likely to be a student well after an age when he should be working for a living and contributing to a society he thinks owes him one   Guardian readers like myself expect, and embrace, such attacks – we are amazed that our dwindling band of Guardianistas continues to occupy such a prominent place in the national mindset Only 200,000 of us are willing to pay £140 (£230 on Saturday) for the paper, a drop of 11 per cent from last year Guardiancouk may attract over four million unique hits a day (second only to Mail Online in the UK), but the Guardian’s print readership is just over a tenth of the Daily Mail’s and half that of The Times More Britons buy the Scottish Daily Record, yet (as far as I am aware) no pejorative term exists for its patrons   Guardian staff members have enough self-awareness to understand that their work is not to everyone’s taste Last year Michael White, the paper’s assistant editor, listed the charge sheet as follows: ‘Naive, subversive, priggish, lentil-eating, sandal- wearing, feminist, humourless’ Outside of the fold, cartoonish reactionaries tend to project their personal anxieties onto the

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

November 2015

Wolves

Jeon Sungtae

TR. Sora Kim-Russell

fiction

November 2015

The Chief   The sound of the bell for the closing of the temple gate reaches my ears. I...

feature

July 2013

Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

Alexander Christie-Miller

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July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus...

poetry

December 2012

Off-Season

Miles Klee

poetry

December 2012

As a boy I went on a strange vacation with a friend. His parents took us, I can’t remember why,...

 

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