The Fictional World of Javier Marías offers a fresh perspective on the narrative universe of one of Spain’s most distinguished contemporary authors. In order to establish the origin and meaning of uncertainty in his fiction, this book presents interpretations of a range of issues inherent to Marías’s canon, in particular those related to the nature of language. With the relationship between language and uncertainty at its heart, this study considers the use of foreign languages, translation, and the effect of silence through an analysis of: Todas las almas (1989), Corazón tan blanco (1992), Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994) and Tu rostro mañana (2002-2007).

A daring masterwork by Javier Marias: "Spain's most subtle and gifted writer." (The Boston Globe)

A book by Spain's greatest living writer weaves fiction and fact into a completely original and unforgettable hybrid. Called by its author a "false novel," Dark Back of Time begins with the tale of the odd effects of publishing All Souls, his witty and sardonic 1989 Oxford novel. All Souls is a book Marías swears to be fiction, but which its "characters"--the real-life dons and professors and bookshop owners who have "recognized themselves"--fiercely maintain to be a roman à clef. With the sleepy world of Oxford set into fretful motion by a world that never "existed," Dark Back of Time begins an odyssey into the nature of identity and of time. Marías weaves together autobiography, a legendary kingdom, strange ghostly literary figures, halls of mirrors, a one-eyed pilot, a curse in Havana, and a bullet lost in Mexico.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST • From the award-winning, internationally bestselling Spanish author of A Heart So White comes an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder. "Sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent ... Marías [has] a penetrating empathy."—The New York Times Book Review Each day before work María Dolz stops at the same café. There she finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Observing their seemingly perfect life helps her escape the listlessness of her own. But when the man is brutally murdered and María approaches the widow to offer her condolences, what began as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement. Invited into the widow's home, she meets—and falls in love with—a man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime. As María recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly encased in a metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, chance and coincidence, and above all, with the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told.

An affectionate and very funny gallery of twenty great world authors from the pen of "the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature" (The Boston Globe).

A visiting Spanish lecturer at Oxford University is amused, puzzled, delighted and disgusted by its vagaries of human vanity. With little to do, and unable to visit his very-married mistress, he has time to observe Oxford vagaries and mores.

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.