Javier Cercas

This is a series of articles and short essays published in media such as Diari de Barcelona and Quimera. It’s not just another miscellany: revised and placed in order by the author, these texts offer many keys to Cercas’ literary works: from his peculiar, and intriguing, thesis on the concept of the novel to the role of intellectuals in today’s society, and even his ever-amusing analyses of his “bedside” writers’ works (from Borges to Bioy Casares, from Paul Auster to John Irving), making this book a sort of intellectual autobiography. This is also how Cercas himself interprets it: “Oscar Wilde used to say that literary criticism is the only civilised form of autobiography that exists. I don’t know if the papers I now bring together belong to the genre of literary criticism; on the other hand, I am convinced that the story they tell is always autobiographical.”