by Enrique Vila-Matas (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (translator)
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.
"Starred Review. Vila-Matas fills his fiction with forlorn characters - the title story, for example, follows a depressed, hunchbacked vampire - yet never have so many stories about distressed personalities been so incredibly amusing." - Publishers Weekly
"Readers not befuddled by the twists and turns Vila-Matas packs into a few pages are likely to be enchanted by narrators who are never quite trustworthy ("I treated other people's memories as mine, and that is why I can now boast of having had a life"), offbeat setups, and brilliant language. Odd stories with a bite: cynical, funny, and often puzzling." - Kirkus
"With his ironic worldview and playful sense of fatality, Vila-Matas's reputation as a writer of intellectually stimulating but accessible novels looks set to grow among English-language readers." - The Wall Street Journal
"Arguably Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure." - Joanna Kavenna, The New Yorker
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona in 1948. His novels have been translated into eleven languages and honored by many prestigious literary awards including the Prix Médicis Etranger. Author of Bartleby & Co., Montano's Malady, and Never Any End to Paris, he has received Europe's most prestigious awards and been translated into twenty-seven languages.
Margaret Jull Costa is an award-winning translator of Portuguese and Spanish literature. She lives in the United Kingdom.
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