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Search Results for: cercas

Showing 1-9 of 9 results for cercas

The Blind Spot

The Blind Spot

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Javier Cercas

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£16.99
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Hardcover
An essential collection of literary criticism by one of Spain’s most acclaimed authors

Javier Cercas is one of the most enjoyable and innovative novelists at work today. Well known among English-language readers as the author of Soldiers of Salamis (winner of the Independent Foreign Fictio Prize), The Anatomy of a Moment and The Impostor, Cercas is also Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Girona. In 2015, following in the footsteps of George Steiner, Mario Vargas Llosa and Umberto Eco, as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative European Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford, Cercas gave a series of five lectures on the novel today, which have since been revised and are now published in English for the first time as The Blind Spot.

Starting with Don Quixote and his own experience as a writer, Cercas launches out into a consideration of the most challenging fiction of the last hundred years, from Kafka, Borges, Perec, Calvino and Kundera, to Sebald, Coetzee, Barnes, Foster Wallace and Knausgård. First, he defines and celebrates certain aspects of the novel in the twenty-first century which are also features of Cervantes’ masterpiece: its essential irony and ambiguity, its total commitment to innovation, its natural, joyful and omnivorous desire to cram the whole world within its pages, and its intricate concern with fiction and reality. Then he moves on to consider the actual meaning of the novel, the uncertain and discredited role of the writer as intellectual, and the role of the reader in the creation of a form whose aim is to tell the truth by telling lies.

The result is a dazzling short book which provides a new interpretation of novel from Cervantes and Melville to the present, and which will be as stimulating for readers and writers of literature in the twenty-first century as E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel or Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel were in the last.

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
The Impostor

The Impostor

Contributors

Javier Cercas

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£9.99
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Paperback
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LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL 2018

A TRUE STORY THAT IS PACKED WITH FICTION – FICTION CREATED BY ITS MAIN CHARACTER, ENRIC MARCO

But who is Enric Marco? A veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a fighter against fascism, an impassioned campaigner for justice, and a survivor of the Nazi death camps? Or, is he simply an old man with delusions of grandeur, a charlatan who fabricated his heroic war record, who was never a prisoner in the Third Reich and never opposed Franco; a charming, beguiling and compulsive liar who refashioned himself as a defender of liberty and who was unmasked in 2005 at the height of his influence and renown?

In this extraordinary novel – part narrative, part history, part essay, part biography, part autobiography – Javier Cercas unravels the enigma of the man and delves with passion and honesty into the most ambiguous aspects of what makes us human – our infinite capacity for self-deception, our need for conformity, our thirst for affection and our conflicting needs for fiction and for truth.

Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne
Soldiers of Salamis

Soldiers of Salamis

Contributors

Javier Cercas

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Price
£9.99
Format
Paperback
The International Bestseller of the Spanish Civil War – Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

In the final moments of the Spanish Civil War, fifty prominent Nationalist prisoners are executed by firing squad. Among them is the writer and fascist Rafael Sanchez Mazas. As the guns fire, he escapes into the forest, and can hear a search party and their dogs hunting him down. The branches move and he finds himself looking into the eyes of a militiaman, and faces death for the second time that day.

But the unknown soldier simply turns and walks away. Sanchez Mazas becomes a national hero and the soldier disappears into history. As Cercas sifts the evidence to establish what happened, he realises that the true hero may not be Sanchez Mazas at all, but the soldier who chose not to shoot him. Who was he? Why did he spare him? And might he still be alive?

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Lord of All the Dead

Lord of All the Dead

Contributors

Javier Cercas

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£10.99
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Paperback
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Lord of All the Dead is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas’ family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents’ village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas’ mother, died in combat at the age of nineteen during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain’s history.

Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge him, as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, interpreting history from our supposed omniscience and the misleading
perspective of a present full of automatic answers, that fails to consider the particularities of each personal and family drama?

Wartime epics, heroism and death are some of the underlying themes of this unclassifiable novel that combines road trips, personal confessions, war stories and historical scholarship, finally becoming an incomparable tribute to the author’s mother and the incurable scars of an entire generation.

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Even the Darkest Night

Even the Darkest Night

Contributors

Javier Cercas

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£9.99
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Paperback
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WINNER OF THE CWA DAGGER FOR CRIME FICTION IN TRANSLATION

“A gem of a book, easily the best I’ve read this year. A contemporary police procedural with a literary edge. I was rooting for the flawed, but deeply compassionate Melchor Marín from the first page to the last. Highly recommended” M W Craven

Two dead at the Adell house . . .

But nothing in the duty officer’s report can prepare Melchor Marín for what he finds. A wealthy couple tortured to death in an almost ritualistic manner. The little town of Gandesa in the backwater region of Terra
Alta, Catalonia, is suddenly at the eye of a media storm.

Melchor is no stranger to notoriety. He was sent to Terra Alta to lie low after foiling a terrorist attack. And, before
that, he was jailed for his role as driver for a Colombian drug cartel, his decision to join the police inspired by a
desire to avenge his mother’s murder and a copy of Les Misérables from the prison library.

Gradually, the leads in the Adell case dry up, and Melchor is ordered to back off. He doesn’t, willing to sacrifice his reputation and career in a ruthless pursuit of the truth. But dusk is already falling on the darkest night of his life.

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean
Austral

Austral

Contributors

Carlos Fonseca

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£20
Format
Hardcover
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“A multilayered exploration of ideas . . . [A] masterly voyage of discovery” New York Times

“Fonseca’s most ambitious, most complex and most accomplished novel to date” JAVIER CERCAS

“An exceptional and intricate novel of depth, insight and understanding” Irish Times

“A tender and thoughtful exploration of the painful irony of being alive” KATHARINA VOLCKMER

“A beautifully knotted novel which unfolds with every traced layer of its deeply affecting narrative” GUY GUNARATNE

“Expansive and thought-provoking” Guardian

A dazzling novel about the traces we leave, the traces we erase and the traces we seek to rebuild.

In this innovative novel three losses and three quests are pursued. English writer Aliza Abravanel tries, in a battle with aphasia, to finish her book. A last indigenous speaker is confronted with the fading of his culture and language while an anthropologist struggles to prevent it. And through the construction of an esoteric theatre of memory, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1970s and ’80s seeks to recover the memories lost after the traumas of war. And behind these three threads lies the narrator’s own story: Julio, a disillusioned university professor, must try to understand and complete his friend Aliza’s novel, and come to terms with a past he shared with her but has blanked for thirty years.

From the Guatemalan wilderness to the high Peruvian Amazon, passing through Nueva Germania, the anti-Semitic commune founded in Paraguay by Nietzsche’s sister, Austral takes us on a long journey south, following a trail of ecological and cultural destruction to excavate contemporary xenophobia.

“Reminiscent of the best of Bolaño, Borges and Calvino” Guardian

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
Prey for the Shadow

Prey for the Shadow

Contributors

Javier Cercas

Price and format

Price
£22
Format
Hardcover
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The mayor of Barcelona is being blackmailed.

A sex tape from her student days – one she never knew existed. The price: 300,000 euros and her immediate resignation.

A political chameleon who swept to power on a populist wave, she has her enemies. Nor can she trust those closest to her. Both her ex-husband and her deputy would profit from her fall.

Melchor Marín, living a quiet life in Terra Alta, is tempted back to Barcelona to work the case. But what seemed a simple matter has its roots in far more serious and disturbing crimes.

With the mayor on the verge of capitulation, a shock revelation changes everything – not least the course of Melchor’s life. At long last, his heart’s dark desire is in his grasp.

Praise for Even the Darkest Night

“A gem of a book, easily the best I’ve read this year” M W Craven

“A wonderful novel. I look forward to many more Melchor stories” A N Wilson

“The first in what promises to be an excellent series” Guardian

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Javier Cercas

Javier Cercas was born in 1962. He is a novelist, short-story writer and columnist, whose books include Soldiers of Salamis (which sold more than a million copies worldwide, won six literary awards in Spain and was filmed by David Trueba), The Tenant and The Motive, The Speed of Light and The Anatomy of a Moment. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Barcelona.

Frank Wynne

Frank Wynne is an award-winning writer and translator. His previous translations include works by Virginie Despentes, Javier Cercas, Mathias Énard, Michel Houllebecq and Pierre Lemaitre. He chaired the jury of the 2022 Booker International. Most recently his translation of The Art of Losing won the 2022 Dublin Literary Award.
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