Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50
Book Description
A novella—half joke and half nightmare— by "Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" (The New Yorker) Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse. “Something strange happened along the way,” Vila-Matas wrote. “Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.”
Because She Never Asked (New Directions Pearls)
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50
Book Description
A novella—half joke and half nightmare— by "Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" (The New Yorker) Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse. “Something strange happened along the way,” Vila-Matas wrote. “Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.”
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225704
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 50
Book Description
A novella—half joke and half nightmare— by "Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" (The New Yorker) Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith's Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse. “Something strange happened along the way,” Vila-Matas wrote. “Normally, writers try to pass a work of fiction off as being real. But in Because She Never Asked, the opposite occurred: in order to give meaning to the story of my life, I found that I needed to present it as fiction.”
Montanao's Malady
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225291
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
A quirky, cosmopolitan novel about life and literature by the prize-winning Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Bartleby & Co. The narrator of Montano’s Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir and philosophical musings, Enrique Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Bolano, Coetzee, and Sebald cross endlessly surprising paths. Trying to piece together his life of loss and pain, Jose leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Exquisitely witty and erudite, it confirms the opinion of Bernardo Axtaga that Vila-Matas is "the most important living Spanish writer."
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811225291
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
A quirky, cosmopolitan novel about life and literature by the prize-winning Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas, author of Bartleby & Co. The narrator of Montano’s Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir and philosophical musings, Enrique Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Bolano, Coetzee, and Sebald cross endlessly surprising paths. Trying to piece together his life of loss and pain, Jose leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Exquisitely witty and erudite, it confirms the opinion of Bernardo Axtaga that Vila-Matas is "the most important living Spanish writer."
Optic Nerve
Author: Maria Gainza
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220021
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
"In this delightful autofiction―the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English―a woman delivers pithy assessments of world–class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole." ―The New York Times Book Review, Notable Book of the Year and Editors' Choice The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko’s refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator’s husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault’s workshop; Gustave Courbet’s devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires―her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies. Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve marks the English–language debut of a major Argentinian writer. It is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1646220021
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
"In this delightful autofiction―the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English―a woman delivers pithy assessments of world–class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole." ―The New York Times Book Review, Notable Book of the Year and Editors' Choice The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo’s bodies. The mystery of Rothko’s refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator’s husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault’s workshop; Gustave Courbet’s devilish seascapes incite viewers “to have sex, or to eat an apple”; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau’s honor . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator’s life in Buenos Aires―her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies. Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve marks the English–language debut of a major Argentinian writer. It is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.
A Brief History of Portable Literature
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811223388
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 66
Book Description
A reader’s fictional tour of the art and lives of some of the great 20th-century Surrealists An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short “history” of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of “portable literature.” The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico García Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O’Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness the Shandies having adventures in stationary submarines, underground caverns, African backwaters, and the cultural capitals of Europe.
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811223388
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 66
Book Description
A reader’s fictional tour of the art and lives of some of the great 20th-century Surrealists An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short “history” of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of “portable literature.” The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book, its members include writers and artists like Marcel Duchamp, Aleister Crowley, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico García Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O’Keefe. The Shandies meet secretly in apartments, hotels, and cafes all over Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness the Shandies having adventures in stationary submarines, underground caverns, African backwaters, and the cultural capitals of Europe.
Morphine (New Directions Pearls)
Author: Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811221695
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 65
Book Description
From the author of The Master and Margarita comes this short and tragic masterpiece about drug addiction Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend’s aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov’s uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction — his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811221695
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 65
Book Description
From the author of The Master and Margarita comes this short and tragic masterpiece about drug addiction Young Dr. Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend’s aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov’s uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction — his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.
The End of Days
Author: Jenny Erpenbeck
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811221938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated novel of 2014, now a New Directions paperback Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there…. A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811221938
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178
Book Description
Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for the best translated novel of 2014, now a New Directions paperback Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Hans Fallada Prize, The End of Days, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five “books,” each leading to a different death of the same unnamed female protagonist. How could it all have gone differently?—the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna after World War I, but a pact she makes with a young man leads to a second death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there…. A novel of incredible breadth and amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of the twentieth century.
Mac's Problem
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811227332
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel is perhaps his greatest: “playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists” (Colm Tóibín) Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wife’s earnings. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac’s wife, a dyslexic, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression—but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary won't turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a neighbor, a successful author of a collection of enigmatic, willfully obscure stories. Mac decides that he will read, revise, and improve his neighbor’s stories, which are mostly narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices. As Mac embarks on this task, he finds that the stories have a strange way of imitating life. Or is life imitating the stories? As the novel progresses, Mac becomes more adrift from reality, and both he and we become ever more immersed in literature: a literature haunted by death, but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing.
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811227332
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel is perhaps his greatest: “playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists” (Colm Tóibín) Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wife’s earnings. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac’s wife, a dyslexic, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression—but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary won't turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a neighbor, a successful author of a collection of enigmatic, willfully obscure stories. Mac decides that he will read, revise, and improve his neighbor’s stories, which are mostly narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices. As Mac embarks on this task, he finds that the stories have a strange way of imitating life. Or is life imitating the stories? As the novel progresses, Mac becomes more adrift from reality, and both he and we become ever more immersed in literature: a literature haunted by death, but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing.
Revealing Eden
Author: Victoria Foyt
Publisher: Sand Dollar Press Incorporated
ISBN: 9780983650324
Category : Bildungsromans
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
A modern day Beauty and the Beast tale about a white skinned pearl in a world of dark skinned coals.
Publisher: Sand Dollar Press Incorporated
ISBN: 9780983650324
Category : Bildungsromans
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
A modern day Beauty and the Beast tale about a white skinned pearl in a world of dark skinned coals.
Vampire in Love
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811223477
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
“Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary literary figure” (Joanna Kavenna, The New Yorker) Gathered for the first time in English, and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas’s finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choirboy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras’s Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist, visits his abandoned villa, and is privy to a secret. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by the renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas’s signature erudition and wit and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811223477
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
“Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary literary figure” (Joanna Kavenna, The New Yorker) Gathered for the first time in English, and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas’s finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choirboy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras’s Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist, visits his abandoned villa, and is privy to a secret. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by the renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas’s signature erudition and wit and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.
The Dry Heart
Author: Natalia Ginzburg
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228797
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 86
Book Description
Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228797
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 86
Book Description
Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?