Enrique Vila-Matas Books

"Arguably Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure" (Joanna Kavenna, The New Yorker)

Gonzalez-Foerster works experimentally. Engaging with the exhibition as a medium, her spatial inventions and investigations probe the notion of display, as well as how an image or scene is experienced. Drawing on wide-ranging references from music, literature, film, architecture and pop culture, the artist creates densely layered environments with the ability to transport viewers into alternative narrative, temporal and psychological dimensions.00Alienarium 5 is a speculative environment that invites us to imagine possible encounters with extraterrestrials. The catalogue is a culmination of her decades-long interest in science fiction and continued research into deep space and alien life. Conceived site-specifically for Serpentine, the exhibition will feature almost entirely new work that engages both the gallery?s internal and external space.00Exhibition: Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom (14.04. - 04.09.2022).

Literature can be contagious; it can also be our only means of salvation. That at least is the experience of Montano, the 'unreliable narrator' of Enrique Vila-Matas' prize-winning novel, a man and a writer who is so obsessed with the books of certain celebrated contemporaries that he is unable to put pen to paper or utter a word without summoning up their work or their lives, and whose malady is that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings, Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Perec, Bolaño, Coetzee, Sebald and Magris cross endlessly surprising paths, while his protagonist 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 Valparaíso. Yet for all the author's dazzling literary pyrotechnics, this is a novel that is always witty and accessible.

The first of four special publications to accompany a year-long display of works from Barcelona's la Caixa Collection at Whitechapel Gallery, selected by and featuring newly-commissioned fictional works by some of the most original English and Spanish-language writers working today.

In Bartleby Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: "I would prefer not to." Addressing such "artists of refusal" as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger, Bartleby Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is an utterly engaging work of profound and philosophical beauty.

The narrative follows Jose, a writer whose obsession with literature blurs the lines between reality and fiction. This work blends picaresque elements, diary entries, and philosophical reflections, featuring a host of literary figures like Cervantes and Kafka. As Jose navigates a journey through European cities and beyond, he confronts themes of loss and pain, offering readers a witty and erudite exploration of the literary world. The novel showcases Enrique Vila-Matas's status as a significant contemporary Spanish author.

Trying to be Ernest Hemingway is never easy. Surrounded by the writers, artists and eccentrics of '70s Parisian cafe culture, he dresses in black, buys two pairs of reading glasses, and smokes a pipe like Sartre.Never Any End to Paris is a hilarious, playful novel about literature and the art of writing, and how life never quite goes to plan.

Marcelo, a humble clerk in a Barcelona office who might have come from a novel by Kafka, inhibits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing and a mental trauma has meant that he has been unable to put pen to paper; he has become a 'Bartleby'.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE'A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.' Roberto BolanoSamuel Riba is about to turn 60.

One of the most richly allusive novels you're likely to encounter... [a] thrillingly imaginative exploration of creativity Alex Clark Observer