Bøker av Enrique Vila-Matas

Gonzalez-Foerster works experimentally. Engaging with the exhibition as a medium, her spatial inventions and investigations probe the notion of display, as well as how an image or scene is experienced. Drawing on wide-ranging references from music, literature, film, architecture and pop culture, the artist creates densely layered environments with the ability to transport viewers into alternative narrative, temporal and psychological dimensions.Alienarium 5 is a speculative environment that invites us to imagine possible encounters with extraterrestrials. The catalogue is a culmination of her decades-long interest in science fiction and continued research into deep space and alien life. Conceived site-specifically for Serpentine, the exhibition will feature almost entirely new work that engages both the gallery's internal and external space.Ed.: Tatiana Kontou, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.

Mac is currently unemployed and lives on his wife's earnings. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac's wife, a dyslexic, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression-but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary won't turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a neighbor, a successful author of a collection of enigmatic, willfully obscure stories. Mac decides that he will read, revise, and improve his neighbor's stories, which are mostly narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices. As Mac embarks on this task, he finds that the stories have a strange way of imitating life. Or is life imitating the stories? As the novel progresses, Mac becomes more adrift from reality, and both he and we become ever more immersed in literature: a literature haunted by death, but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing.

The first of four special publications to accompany a year-long display of works from Barcelona's "la Caixa" Collection at Whitechapel Gallery, selected by and featuring newly-commissioned fictional works by some of the most original English and Spanish-language writers working today.

Gathered for the first time in English, Vampire in Love offers Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas's finest short stories. Selected and brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, they are all told with Vila-Matas's delightful erudition and wit, and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.

The writer's mission will be to transform himself into a living art installation, by sitting down to write every morning in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town. Once in Kassel, the writer is surprised to find himself overcome by good cheer.

Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir, part philosophical musings, this work serves as a labyrinth in which writers cross endlessly surprising paths, while the author's protagonist leads the reader on a journey from European cities to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso.

Trying to be Ernest Hemingway is never easy. Surrounded by the writers, artists and eccentrics of '70s Parisian cafe culture, he dresses in black, buys two pairs of reading glasses, and smokes a pipe like Sartre.Never Any End to Paris is a hilarious, playful novel about literature and the art of writing, and how life never quite goes to plan.

This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas's trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The "lecturer" tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras's garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: "I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy." Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will "kill" its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.

A puzzling phone call shatters a writer's routine. An enigmatic female voice extends a dinner invitation, and it soon becomes clear that this is an invitation to take part in the documenta, the legendary exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany.  The writer's mission will be to sit down to write every morning in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of town, transforming himself into a living art installation. Once in Kassel, the writer is surprised to find himself overcome by good cheer as he strolls through the city, spurred on by the endless supply of energy at the heart of the exhibition. This is his spontaneous, quirky response to art, rising up against pessimism.With humor, profundity, and a sharp eye, Enrique Vila-Matas tells the story of a solitary man, who, roaming the streets amid oddities and wonder, takes it upon himself to translate from a language he does not understand.

Marcelo, a humble clerk in a Barcelona office who might have come from a novel by Kafka, inhibits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing and a mental trauma has meant that he has been unable to put pen to paper; he has become a 'Bartleby'.