by Enrique Vila-Matas (Author), Margaret Jull Costa (translator)
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2016
282 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
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
This information about Vampire in Love was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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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