| Written Lives Contributor(s): Marías, Javier (Author), Costa, Margaret Jull (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0811216896 ISBN-13: 9780811216890 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $13.46 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: May 2007 Annotation: A heartfelt and very funny gallery of mini-biographies of twenty great world authors. Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover from a remarkable distance away"), Javier Marias has a sharp eye. He casts a long, shrewd, but appreciative look over his cast of great writers. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona, '" as is Oscar Wilde, who in debt and in great pain on his deathbed, ordered up a bottle of champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" William Faulkner, refusing to be "beholden to every son of a bitch with two cents to buy a stamp," is fired from the U.S. Post Office. Marias also considers "the fairly disastrous" lives of Malcolm Lowery, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Lawrence Sterne. Affection glows through "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." |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures - Literary Collections | Essays |
| Dewey: B |
| Physical Information: 0.59" H x 7.1" W x 7.94" (0.53 lbs) 208 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Marias, Javier: - Javier Marías 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.Costa, Margaret Jull: - MARGARET JULL COSTA is a three-time winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. For New Directions, she has translated works by Rafael Chirbes, Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, Eça de Queirós, and Enrique Vila-Matas. |