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 Bronte, 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."

About the Author
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. Margaret Jull Costa, who has translated Javier Marias and Jose Saramago, lives in England.

Reviews
"Reading these portraits is addictive; one keeps turning pages in anticipation of Marias' keen and amusing analyses." -- Publishers Weekly
"It is difficult to be moderate about the charm of these brief portraits...Delicious, slyly ironic.... A delightful volume." -- Michael Dirda - The Washington Post Book World
"They may be miniatures, but they're curious, addictive, and profound in their brevity.... The next thing Marias deserves is the Nobel Prize." -- The Observer [London]
"His prose demonstrates an unusual blend of sophistication and accessibility." -- Wyatt Mason - The New Yorker
"A great writer." -- Salman Rushdie
"I am greatly impressed by the quality of Marias's writing." -- W. G. Sebald
"Javier Marias is in my opinion one of the best contemporary writers." -- J. M. Coetzee
"Mini-biographies of classic authors like Nabokov, Wilde, Rimbaud, Faulkner and Bronte written from the point of view of everything that went wrong in their lives. But funny! A must-read for any bibliophile." -- Caroline Stanley - Flavorwire



Book Information
ISBN 9780811216890
Author Javier Marias
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publisher New Directions Publishing Corporation
Weight(grams) 245g
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 132mm * 15mm