Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Written Lives

Written Lives

Marías, Javier
Costa, Margaret Jull

Paperback

Literary FiguresLetters & Essays

Publisher Price: $14.95

ISBN10: 0811216896
ISBN13: 9780811216890
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: May 17 2007
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.59 Width: 7.10 Depth: 7.94
Language: English
In addition to his own busy career as one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers (TLS), Javier Marías 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 Brontë, 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), Marías 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 Marías remarks, that although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun.

Also in

Literary Figures

View All