Written Lives: Essays

Author:   Margaret Jull Costa ,  Javier Marías
Publisher:   New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN:  

9780811216111


Pages:   192
Publication Date:   07 February 2006
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained


Our Price $60.59 Quantity:  
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Written Lives: Essays


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Overview

"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."""

Full Product Details

Author:   Margaret Jull Costa ,  Javier Marías
Publisher:   New Directions Publishing Corporation
Imprint:   New Directions Publishing Corporation
Dimensions:   Width: 14.50cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 21.10cm
Weight:   0.382kg
ISBN:  

9780811216111


ISBN 10:   081121611
Pages:   192
Publication Date:   07 February 2006
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Inactive
Availability:   Out of stock   Availability explained

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Margaret Jull Costa is the award-winning translator of works by Eca de Quieros, Javier Marias, and Jose Saramago. Javier Marias is an award-winning Spanish novelist. He is also a translator and columnist, as well as the current king of Redonda. He was born in Madrid in 1951 and published his first novel at the age of nineteen. He has held academic posts in Spain, the US (he was a visiting professor at Wellesley College) and Britain, as a lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University. He has been translated into 34 languages, and more than six million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. In 1997 he won the Nelly Sachs Award; the Comunidad de Madrid award in 1998; in 2000 the Grinzane Cavour Award, the Alberto Moravia Prize, and the Dublin IMPAC Award. He also won the Spanish National Translation Award in 1979 for his translation of Tristram Shandy in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.

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