Description
Book SynopsisGathered 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 choir boy. 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 and visits his abandoned villa. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas’s delightful erudition and wit, and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.
Trade Review‘A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.’ -- Roberto Bolaño
‘Highly original, both lucid and ludic.’ -- Valerie Miles * The Guardian *
‘He absorbs the reader into a singular territory in which life and literature are a shared enterprise.’ -- Valerie Miles * New York Times *
‘Arguably Spain’s most significant contemporary literary figure.’ -- Joanna Kavenna * New Yorker *
‘Enrique Vila-Matas is a consistently rich and challenging contemporary Spanish-language novelist’ * World Literature Today *
