{"product_id":"written-lives-9780811216890","title":"Written Lives","description":"In addition to his own busy career as \"one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers\" (\u003cem\u003eTLS\u003c\/em\u003e), 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 \u003cem\u003eWritten Lives\u003c\/em\u003e. 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMarías, Javier:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cstrong\u003eJavier Marías\u003c\/strong\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003eTristram Shandy\u003c\/em\u003e in 1979. He was a professor at Oxford University and the Complutense of Madrid. He currently lives in Madrid.\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eCosta, Margaret Jull:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cstrong\u003eMargaret Jull Costa\u003c\/strong\u003e, \u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003ewho has translated José Saramago and Machado de Assis, \u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003elives in England.","brand":"New Directions Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50914101952786,"sku":"9780811216890","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_174ddb1c-136a-4ddf-89ed-f0eb41ced5d2.jpg?v=1738805383","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/written-lives-9780811216890","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}