Gathered for the first time in English and spanning his entire career, Vampire in Love offers a selection of the Spanish master Enrique Vila-Matas's finest short stories. An effeminate, hunchbacked barber on the verge of death falls in love with a choir boy. A fledgling writer on barbiturates visits Marguerite Duras's Paris apartment and watches his dinner companion slip into the abyss. An unsuspecting man receives a mysterious phone call from a lonely ophthalmologist and visits his abandoned villa. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas's delightful erudition and wit, and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.

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 newlycommissioned fictional works by some of the most original English and Spanish-language writers working today. Established in Barcelona in 1985 by Fundacion `la Caixa', the `la Caixa' Collection of Contemporary Art features over 1,000 works of international contemporary art from the last 30 years, including artists such as Antoni Tapies, Joseph Beuys, Cornelia Parker and Doris Salcedo. For a major four-part display running from 2019-20, Whitechapel Gallery has partnered with `la Caixa' Collection to showcase key pieces from the Collection, with each of the four `chapters' curated by a contemporary writer, who will also contribute a brand new work of fiction in response to their selection. Each display will be accompanied by a fullyillustrated catalogue featuring the works displayed and the new text, accompanied by a foreword and introduction from both institutions. The first chapter, on display in Spring 2019, will be selected by the award-winning Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas (b. Barcelona, 1948; lives and works in Barcelona), who has been described by The New Yorker as `arguably Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure'. His work is often described as metafiction, a form of writing frequently used to examine the relationship between art and life. Vila-Matas' books include Because She Never Asked (2015, originally written for Sophie Calle), The Illogic of Kassel (2014), Dublinesque (2010) and Bartleby & Co (2000), and his new book, titled Mac y su contratiempo (Mac's Problem) will be released in English in April 2019, coinciding with the display at Whitechapel Gallery. Vila-Matas has selected works by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Miquel Barcelo, Dora Garcia, Carlos Pazos and Gerhard Richter.

A puzzling phone call shatters a writer's routine. An enigmatic female voice extends an invitation to take part in Documenta, the legendary contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany. 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. As he strolls through the city, spurred on by his spontaneous, quirky response to art, he begins to make sense of the wonders that surround him. 'A writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel' Roberto Bolano 'Vila-Matas's work made a tremendous impression on me' Paul Auster

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE Enrique Vila-Matas's new novel is perhaps his greatest: 'playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists' Colm Toibin Sixty-something Mac is not writing a novel. He is writing a diary, which no one will ever read. His wife, Carmen, thinks he is wasting his time. But Mac persists, diligently recording his daily walks through the neighbourhood during the hottest summer Barcelona has seen in over a century. But soon he notices that life is exhibiting strange literary overtones, and in the sweltering heat, he becomes ever more immersed in literature - a literature haunted by death but alive with the sheer pleasure of writing. Intricate, erudite and practically fizzing on the page, Mac and His Problem is a masterpiece of metafiction and a testament to the power and playfulness of great literature. 'So deeply comical on the one hand, and so deeply poignant on the other, that you just have to give yourself up to it because you're in the hands of a master' Paul Auster '[Vila-Matas] chooses humour in a way that allows him to have big ideas while relentlessly making fun of them' Sunday Telegraph

"Pitol is unfathomable; it could almost be said that he is a literature entire of himself." -- Daniel Saldana Paris, author of Among Strange Victims The debut work in English by Mexico's greatest and most influential living author and winner of the Cervantes Prize ("the Spanish language Nobel"), The Art of Flight takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the world's cultural capitals as Sergio Pitol looks back on his well-traveled life as a legendary author, translator, scholar, and diplomat. The first work in Pitol's "Trilogy of Memory," The Art of Flight imaginatively blends the genres of fiction and memoir in a Borgesian swirl of contemplation and mystery, expanding our understanding and appreciation of what literature can be and what it can do. Sergio Pitol Demeneghi (b. 1933 in Puebla), one of Mexico's most acclaimed writers and literary translators, studied law and philosophy in Mexico City, and served for over thirty years as a cultural attache in Mexican embassies and consulates across the globe, which is reflected in his diverse and universal writing. In recognition of the importance of his entire canon of literary work, Pitol was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize in 1999 (now known as the FIL Literary Award in Romance Languages), and in 2005 the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish language world. George Henson is currently completing a PhD in humanities (with an emphasis on literary and translation studies) at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his BA from University of Oklahoma, and his MA from Middlebury College. His most recent published translations have included new works by Elena Poniatowska and Andres Neuman.

Marcelo, a clerk in a Barcelona office who might himself have emerged from a novel by Kafka, inhabits a world peopled by characters in literature. He once wrote a novel about the impossibility of love, but since then he has written nothing. He has, in short, become a 'Bartleby', so named after the character in Herman Melville's short story who, when asked to do something, always replied: 'I would prefer not to.' One day Marcelo sets out to make a search through literature for all those other possible Bartlebys, and with this in mind he has the engagingly original notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both real and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour that are at once hilarious, irreverent and stimulating.