Enrique Vila-Matas
Vampire in Love
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 choir boy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras’ 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.
Read an ExcerptMore Info
- Edited by Margaret Jull-Costa.
- Read more about Vila-Matas on our author page.
- Watch a video of Enrique Vila-Matas in conversation with author Paul Auster here.
- Read an interview with Enrique Vila-Matas in Big Issue North here.
Print status: Available
Author: Enrique Vila-Matas
Translator: Margaret Jull Costa
Original language: Spanish
Format: B-format hardback
Publication date: 3 November 2016
ISBN: 9781908276865
Ebook ISBN: 9781908276872
Availability: UK, Europe and Commonwealth (excl. Canada)
Number of pages: 304
Reviews
Paul Auster
‘Vila-Matas’s work made a tremendous impression on me. I was fascinated by his humour, the incredible knowledge he has of all kinds of literature, his compassion for writers, and his fearlessness in taking on literary subjects and making that part of what he is writing about.’
Roberto Bolaño
'A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel.’
The New Yorker
‘Tales of surrealist noir in which virtually anything can happen except happiness.’
Mark Brazos
The Rumpus
‘Playful, highly accessible, and beautifully translated, the stories in Vampire in Love showcase a master writer who is happy to indulge the imagination and explore the possibilities of existence.’
Lidija Haas
The Telegraph
‘Vila-Matas has found his own solution to the supposed exhaustion of possibilities in literature: a devotion to digression and lightness.’
Valerie Miles
New York Times
‘He absorbs the reader into a singular territory in which life and literature are a shared enterprise.’ Valerie Miles
