* Javier Marías - Novels, Short Stories and Essays (19 books)
JAVIER MARÍAS (1951 – 2022) was widely recognised as Spain’s greatest contemporary novelist. His work, which included 16 novels, three volumes of short stories and several collections of his newspaper articles, has been translated into 44 languages and has, altogether, sold nearly 9m copies worldwide. His numerous literary awards included the 1997 Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; the 2000 Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He was a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize.
Marías’ constant themes – in novels such as A HEART SO WHITE (1992) and THE INFATUATIONS (2011) – were secrets and betrayal, the latter coming perhaps from his father’s experience in the civil war, when – as described in Marías’s spy trilogy, YOUR FACE TOMORROW (2002-07) – he was betrayed by his best friend. The latter was been hailed as one of the great works of 21st century literature, maintaining a taut, suspenseful narrative over 1000+ pages, while continually illuminating and questioning the unreliability of narrative, the (im)possibilities of translation, the contingencies of historical record, and the division between reality and fiction.
These concerns are returned to throughout his oeuvre. DARK BACK OF TIME (1998), a semi-fictional memoir, takes as one of its subjects the critical misattributions of factual and fictional elements in an earlier novel, ALL SOULS (1989), that describes the activities of a Spanish lecturer at Oxford. One of the minor characters in the latter book was the real-life writer John Gawsworth, and led in 1997 to Marías being named the King of Redonda, an unpopulated island in the Antilles formerly "ruled" by Gawsworth. Marías used his status as king to bestow mock-titles on friends and others he admired, including John Ashbery (Duke of Convexo), A. S. Byatt (Duchess of Morpho Eugenia), Francis Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalópolis) and W. G. Sebald (Duke of Vértigo).
This torrent includes his final novel, TOMÁS NEVINSON (2021), written before his death in September 2022. A retired spy — once an agent for British Intelligence, now living a quiet life in Madrid — is approached by his former handler with an offer to bring him back in from the cold for one last assignment. Charting a world in which right and wrong, good and evil, are irreparably blurred, Marías takes us on a journey of rare and unforgettable suspense.
The following books are in ePUB or PDF format, with English translations by Margaret Jull Costa, unless otherwise noted:
== NOVELS ==
* A Heart So White (Penguin / Vintage, 2012)
* All Souls (Penguin / Vintage, 2013)
* Berta Isla (Penguin, 2019)
* Dark Back of Time [tr. Allen] (Penguin / Vintage, 2013)
* The Infatuations, The (Hamish Hamilton / Knopf, 2013)
* The Man of Feeling (Vintage, 2014)
* Thus Bad Begins (Knopf / Penguin, 2016)
* Tomás Nevinson (Penguin, 2023)
* Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (Vintage, 2013)
* Voyage Along the Horizon [tr. Cordero] (Believer, 1972) – PDF
* Your Face Tomorrow I: Fever and Spear (ND / Penguin, 2018)
* Your Face Tomorrow II: Dance and Dream (ND / Penguin, 2018)
* Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (ND / Penguin, 2018)
== SHORT FICTION ==
* Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico [tr. Allen] (New Directions, 2010)
* When I Was Mortal: Stories (Penguin / Vintage, 2013)
* While the Women Are Sleeping (New Directions, 2010)
== NON-FICTION ==
* The Art of Fiction, no. 190 [interview] (Paris Review, Winter 2006) – PDF
* Between Eternities & Other Writings (Penguin / Vintage, 2017)
* Venice, An Interior (Penguin, 2016) – PDF
* Written Lives (Canongate / ND / Penguin, 2009).
