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EMILY BRONTË, THOMAS MANN, JAMES JOYCE, IVAN TURGENEV, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, ARTHUR RIMBAUD, JOSEPH CONRAD, RAINER MARIA RILKE, HENRY JAMES, WILLIAM FAULKNER . . .
Told with a mixture of affection and humour, these brief 'written lives' throw an unexpected, and very human, light on authors too often enshrined, or entombed, in the halo of artistic sainthood. Here, Javier Marías ingeniously revisits the lives and personalities of twenty authors, humanising them and in the process bringing them alive.
'[Marías is] one of the best contemporary European writers.'
JM Coetzee
'Brief, playful, charming and insightful.'
Alan Chadwick, Metro
'Sprightly and entertaining . . . Literary scholars will no doubt frown upon this sort of carry-on, but these essays are often as evocative of their subjects and as full of illuminating little nuggets of information as a well-written obituary.'
Peter Parker, Times Literary Supplement
'An artful antidote to the "exhaustive and futile erudition" of biography . . . Mann, Mishima, Joyce and Rilke get short, damning shrift. Marías sups from the marrow of their bones with a very long spoon.'
Iain Finlayson, The Times
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Cover illustrations © André Carrilho
Cover design by James Hutcheson
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Brand New Copy. Seller Inventory # BBB_new081121611X
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Translation. An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe).In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marias is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Bront?, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented.Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away"), Marias has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,'" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marias remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun." Seller Inventory # DADAX081121611X
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks576836
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.85. Seller Inventory # Q-081121611X
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.85. Seller Inventory # Q-081121611x