ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS (b. 1948) is a Spanish author whose metafictional novels have made him one of the most original and celebrated writers in the Spanish language. He is the author of several award-winning books that have been translated into thirty languages, and a founding Knight of the Order of Finnegans, a group which meets in Dublin every year to honour James Joyce.
His writing is marked by a dazzling array of quotation, plagiarism, frames, self-plagiarism, digressions and meta-digressions. With the publication of A BRIEF HISTORY OF PORTABLE LITERATURE (1985), Vila-Matas transformed into a true original. The book poses as a short "history" of a secret society of 20th-century artists and writers, including Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Kafka, and others. Its reckless linking of real names to imaginary quotations and vice versa, its mingling of fiction with history, made him notorious — and represented a new moment in European fiction. Reality can only be apprehended through a comical, dazzling network of texts — that was the book's basic proposition, and its implications and complications are what Vila-Matas has continued to explore in a number of wildly deconstructive novels.
These celebrated metafictions include BARTLEBY & CO. (2000), which tackles the theme of silence in literature and is told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write; MONTANO'S MALADY (2002), whose narrator is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality; NEVER ANY END TO PARIS (2003), a fictionalised autobiography which masquerades as a lecture at a symposium on irony and tells the story of the author's artistic apprenticeship under the influence of Hemingway; DUBLINESQUE (2010), where Vila-Matas traces a journey connecting the worlds of Joyce and Beckett, revealing the difficulties faced by literary authors, publishers, and good readers in a society where literature is losing influence; and in a series of what Vila-Matas calls critical fictions, including THE ILLOGIC OF KASSEL (2014).
The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:
== NOVELS ==
* Bartleby & Co. (New Directions, 2007). J. Dunne, trans.
* Brief History of Portable Literature, A (New Directions, 2015). McLean, trans.
* Dublinesque (New Directions, 2012). A. McLean and R. Harvey, trans.
* Illogic of Kassel, The (New Directions, 2015). A. McLean and A. Milsom, trans.
* Mac and His Problem (Vintage, 2019). M. Jull Costa & S. Hughes, trans.
* Mac's Problem (New Directions, 2019). M. Jull Costa & S. Hughes, trans.
* Montano's Malady (New Directions, 2007). J. Dunne, trans.
* Never Any End to Paris (New Directions, 2011). A. McLean, trans.
== SHORT STORIES ==
* Because She Never Asked (New Directions, 2015). V. Miles, trans.
* "Bible Seller, The" (1999) 32 Rev. Lit. & Arts Americas 32. Lane, trans. — PDF
* "Boy on the Swing" (Barcelona, 1981), (2002) 70 Grand Street 108 — PDF
* "Far from Here", in Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Hemon, ed.
* Vampire in Love & Other Stories (New Directions, 2016). M. Jull Costa, trans.
== OTHER ==
* Art of Fiction, The (Paris Review, Fall 2020). Interview by A. Thirlwell — PDF
* "Introduction" to The Art of Flight [by Sergio Pitol] (Deep Vellum, 2015).
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