Manuel Vilas

The Best Book in the World, clearly inspired by autobiography, tells the life story of a writer who wakes up every morning, has breakfast, and goes to his private office to create what he hopes will be the best book in the world.

In this funny, irreverent, and talkative story, Vilas shatters the proverbial glass ceiling to reveal who and what a writer truly is—from a place rarely exposed: his vulnerability. The impostor syndrome, the constant (and comical) comparisons with others, disappointment, uncertainty, living alongside joy and failure—all the way to the very end.

A unique, witty, and deeply realistic portrait of how a writer struggles, day after day, to be appreciated, to feel loved, and to achieve immortality. But always through comedy.

Everything in literature is pure fiction. This book tells the truth no one dares to say.

“It moved me and tore me apart. I felt as if he were speaking directly to my soul. A wild comedy, a book about failure and success, money and hunger, poetry and power, depression and pleasure, death and life. It says things many of us feel and think, but which Vilas has written in a way that’s entirely his own.” Sara Mesa

“Manuel Vilas reveals the hidden truths that every writer carries deep in their soul. A moving, brilliant, and profoundly human book. A true celebration for the reader.” Luis Landero

“This book isn’t a book—it’s a fire. The pages burn as you read them; its author burns, running toward the end with his head wrapped in flames; and the reader burns too, searching for the emergency exit. Everything you ever wanted to know about the horror of writing the best book in the world—and never dared to ask.” Juan José Millás

“A wild, euphoric, sprawling, unhinged, hyper-vital, hyper-literary, delirious, comic, humble, and delightfully mad book. Manuel Vilas in his purest state.” Javier Cercas

“Vilas has done it again. With his passionate prose and that backward glance that fascinates the reader, he shows that literature, too, can fight social hypocrisy.” Joana Bonet

Winner of the 2023 Nadal Prize for Fiction

Irene believes she has lived the most perfect marriage in the world. Years of absolute devotion and passion between two human beings—that is how she remembers her love with Marcelo, her late husband.

They shared a connection that both amazed and unsettled those around them: a couple who lived entirely for one another, as if every day were the first. This relationship—the greatest of love stories—kept them isolated from their surroundings, on the margins of ordinary reality.

With Marcelo’s death, Irene’s world shatters. Yet she discovers an unexpected way to go on living beside him, to survive. This act of remembering and invoking the love of her life gives shape to this literary fantasy.

Us is a novel that explores the limits of love itself and, at the same time, a journey into the depths of a woman’s soul—one trapped in an intimate, imaginative, and fatal utopia. But little by little, we come to see that loneliness always imposes its law—and its wound.

When love uncovers the deepest meaning of life.

March 2020. A professor leaves Madrid on medical advice and retreats to a cabin in the mountains, where he meets a passionate woman fifteen years his junior. His name is Salvador; hers, Montserrat. Between them, an unexpected and complete trust begins to grow—one full of revelations.

Their encounters are a great bath of light. Salvador becomes infatuated and renames her Altisidora, after a character from Don Quixote. They fall in love and build a mature relationship, mindful of the frailties of their bodies and their memories: the past reappears constantly.

The Kisses is a novel of romantic and idealized love, but also of the flesh—a story of how, in the midst of a universal crisis, two human beings try to return to the biological and ancestral homeland of eroticism, that mysterious place where men and women discover life’s deepest meaning.

Finalist – 2019 Planeta Prize

From the heart of his memory, a man carrying as many years of past as he does hopes for the future illuminates, through his recollections, his own story—the story of his generation and of a country. A story that sometimes hurts, but always accompanies.

The overwhelming success of his latest novel takes the protagonist on a world tour: a journey with two faces. The public one, in which he meets his readers, and the private one, in which he uses every moment of solitude to search for his own truth. A truth that comes to light after the death of his parents, his divorce, and his life alongside a new woman—a life in which his children become the cornerstone of his urgent need to find happiness.

Halfway between confession and autofiction, the author writes a story that draws strength from the past and propels itself toward what has not yet happened. A hopeful search for joy.

“Even in its smallest details, the writer unfolds a burning, incendiary emotion.” Diario Córdoba

“An intimate and relatable book, in which we see ourselves reflected on many of its pages.” El Español

“A poetic and electrifying book.” El Mundo

“A masterful book—difficult yet easy, eloquent, complex, admirable in its furious simplicity, contradictorily elemental and wise, vast yet intimate, tender and somber.” Nuevatribuna.es

“Manuel Vilas’s writing is spontaneous and fresh at first glance, yet deeply literary upon closer attention.” Euro Mundo Global

Winner of the 2019 Prix Femina Étranger – Best Book of the Year (Babelia) – Recommended by La Esfera – Artes & Letras Literature Prize – Altoaragonés Book of the Year 2018

Written at times from heartbreak and always from emotion, Ordesa is an intimate chronicle of Spain over the past decades—but it is also a story about everything that reminds us of our fragility, about the need to rise up and keep going when nothing seems possible, when almost all the bonds that once tied us to others have vanished or been broken. And yet, we survive.

“Ordesa is the castaway’s letter we had been waiting for years to receive. It arrived in bookstores riding a wave of foam, which, when it receded, left it there on the shore. [...] It was enough to read the first page to realize that this cry for help came from the deepest part of ourselves. It called out to us because, in some way, beyond its protagonists, we too were its authors. [...] It described, with new words arranged in an unusual way, what we had been—and what we tried to save ourselves from. Through a prose that moved back and forth in a hypnotic rhythm, it alternated fierceness with compassion, yes with no, now with then. In short, after reading that first page, we took it home with us.” Juan José Millás, Babelia

“A powerful, sincere, at times raw book about the loss of one’s parents, about the pain of words left unsaid, and about the need to love and be loved.” Fernando Aramburu

“It takes great precision to tell these things; it takes acid, a sharp knife, the exact pin that bursts the balloon of vanity. What remains in the end is the pure emotion of truth and the grief for all that has been lost.” Antonio Muñoz Molina

“One of the most human, profound, and comforting books I have read in a long time.” Lorenzo Silva

“A beautiful and haunting book, composed in equal parts of guilt, rage, and love.” Ignacio Martínez de Pisón

“A unique, brilliant, and fearless writer—utterly his own, and unafraid to take risks.” Sara Mesa

“No one should fail to read Ordesa, by Manuel Vilas. It is the book of 2018—and that’s saying something, for there have been and will be great books. Love as medicine. Poverty as disease. Literature as elixir.” Luisgé Martín

An anti-psychiatry manual for those who truly feel and live with passion. 

From irresistible joy, love and heartbreak, exotic creativity, despair, laughter, intoxication, or madness, the beings that inhabit these pages reveal an originality that may seem hallucinatory. This collection of lunatics—of resplendent rhinoceroses—leads us toward empathy or stunned wonder, but always, in one way or another, toward a deep identification with people who, in their drifting, are truly feeling: chaotically, tenderly, and without restraint.

In this book, Manuel Vilas portrays the exceptional nature of the modern mind and conveys—through impossible, fantastical acrobatics—that the most alluring choice is always disorder. For disorder, even in its most extreme manifestations, is undoubtedly one of the most intense ways to live.

“Vilas is a great poet and, as such, immortal—he lives within time. This condition allows him to converse as an equal with artists who share it: Kafka, Van Gogh, and Picasso.” Jordi Puntí, El Periódico de Catalunya

“Blessed be Vilas and his genre-shredding machine. Blessed be his parodies and caricatures, his grotesque humor and his satire […]. Vilas exploits everything, dares everything. He believes in what he does because he has faith in literature.” Ángel Gracia, El Heraldo de Aragón

“Manuel Vilas is probably the most dangerous writer in Spain right now. Dangerous in the sense of singular, independent, and resistant to every convention.” Javier Calvo, Quimera

“One of the most creative narrators in the field of humor writing today in Spanish.” J. M. Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural

“No one can deny Vilas—not only the narrative stamina of an elite athlete—but also a generous sense of humor and boldness, deeply nourished by tradition.” Manuel de la Fuente, ABC

When sexual fantasy becomes a path of no return.

“The luminous gift will come from the Universe and sweep the world away. I can see it.”

Víctor Dilan is a successful writer moving freely through a prosaic and vulgar Spain. Devoted to sex and endowed with a dark gift — a luminous blessing — he possesses an irresistible magnetism that draws women inexorably to his bed. His life takes a dramatic turn when he meets Ester, the Witch, “a carnivorous incandescence that drives men mad.” This miraculous encounter forces him to face a reflection of himself, harder and more perverse, marking the beginning of an apocalyptic relationship that will lead him toward a longed-for, prophetic destruction.

The reader, turned voyeur, explores the darkest and most intimate corners of a handful of unbridled, lascivious characters entirely surrendered to sex. Weaving together multiple layers of fiction, Manuel Vilas offers a parodic meditation on the nature of love and eroticism, which here acquire a mystical dimension. With a soundtrack by Dylan (whose name inspires the protagonist’s pseudonym) and lucid invocations of masterpieces such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Wuthering Heights, Víctor Dilan’s descent into madness feels like the most sincere and heartbreaking of confessions. A lucid vision of the world—or a hallucinatory one?

With The Luminous Gift, Manuel Vilas opens a new, realist path in his narrative by telling a story in the traditional mode.

“The Luminous Gift contains excellent pages […] Vilas’s literary talent cannot be denied.” Ricardo Senabre, El Cultural

“What distinguishes the author from his contemporaries in today’s innovative fiction is his distance from pretentious cosmopolitanism and his unashamedly Spanish rootedness—lucid, critical, and universal in scope.” Santos Sanz Villanueva, El Cultural

“Vilas is a great poet and, as such, immortal—he lives within time. This condition allows him to speak as an equal with artists who share it: Kafka, Van Gogh, and Picasso.” Jordi Puntí, El Periódico de Catalunya

“Manuel Vilas is probably the most dangerous writer in Spain right now. Dangerous in the sense of singular, independent, and resistant to every convention.” Javier Calvo, Quimera

“To say Manuel Vilas is to name the king of celebration, freedom, and fun. A wild storyteller who writes novels as if they were something else—and would do anything not to die of boredom.” Peio H. Riaño, Público

“One of the most creative narrators in the realm of humor writing today in Spanish.” J. M. Pozuelo Yvancos, ABC Cultural

“No one can deny Vilas—not only the narrative stamina of an elite athlete—but also a generous sense of humor and boldness, deeply nourished by tradition.” Manuel de la Fuente, ABC

The extravagant adventures of a group of characters chosen for immortality.

“Let me remind you that men and women used to die—that is, they disappeared from reality after living only a few years, insignificant amounts of time.”

Year 22,011. The discovery of a manuscript—The Immortals—in the Shakespeare Galaxy arouses both the curiosity and the outrage of the scholars who inhabit that distant world: perfect beings, descendants of humankind, but immortal. As the Shakespearians decipher the text, their conviction begins to crumble—that humans once lived through a kind of evolutionary winter, plagued by poverty, disease, and death.

But what could the manuscript contain that would justify its immediate destruction?

The Immortals recounts the extravagant adventures of several characters chosen for eternal life: Manuel Vilas, attending a poetry conference on the Moon in the year 2040; Ponti (short for Pontiff, in reference to Pope John Paul II), who travels with Mother T (Mother Teresa of Calcutta); Pablo and Vin (Picasso and Van Gogh); Saavedra, the protagonist—a vital, many-sided being who harbors the immortality of none other than Miguel de Cervantes himself; and the unforgettable Corman Martínez, the last communist.

With a postmodern aesthetic where high culture is brought low, and where the comic and the tragic, the solemn and the pathetic, are inseparable, The Immortals builds—through imagination and humor—a defense against all the fears born of the human condition.

“Manuel Vilas is probably the most dangerous writer in Spain right now.” Javier Calvo, Quimera

Boundless imagination, playfulness, sarcasm, and humor in a novel that blends genres, characters, and eras.

Aire Nuestro is a novel—and also the best network on the new independent Spanish television. Across its eleven channels, you’ll find everything from documentaries, interviews from the future, and talk shows, to adult films and home shopping.

Allen Ginsberg and José Lezama Lima holding hands through Purgatory; Johnny Cash driving across Spain in a red Dodge; Sergio Leone firing from the Afterlife at the directors and actors who scorned his spaghetti westerns... Lou Reed, Elvis Presley, Luis Cernuda, and even Vilas himself also parade through this hyperrealist television.

A unique universe brimming with surprising stories, humor, and characters who meet and part within that extraordinary dimension literature reaches only when it destroys form—and its own boundaries. A shape-shifting fiction in which the reader witnesses the narrative consolidation of a daring and original author: Manuel Vilas.

“An anti-realist style that plays with narrative structures and the mutation of identity.” Jon Kortázar, Babelia

“Manuel Vilas astonishes with a renewed critical vision of Spanish society.” J. A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia

“Vilas offers a fantastic challenge: to experience reading as something exciting and fun.” Flavia Company, El Periódico de Catalunya

“In Vilas’s mutant country, pop culture and academic erudition become picturesque bedfellows, both by name and by nature.” Sergi Doria, ABC

“Vilas’s voice is, at every moment, disconcerting and unique.” Vicente Luis Mora, Quimera

“In short, Manuel Vilas delivers a work that stands at the very antipodes of boredom or indifference.” Javier Moreno, Deriva

Following the model of Renaissance poets, Manuel Vilas has composed a kind of poetic autobiography.

A breath of truth and intimacy runs through this book, in which he tells his story without concealment and, in a certain sense, tells ours as well.

“Naïve, enthusiastic, merciful—she is always with me: poetry, everywhere. Poetry is an unfading form of fervor. Out of that fervor, to honor and amplify it, I have gathered in this book the poems I love most, the ones that move me, seduce me, disturb me, or enchant me. Many unpublished poems appear here for the first time. I have also rewritten a few—given them a new appearance. New clothes for all. A day of celebration for all. I believe the book the reader holds in their hands is entirely original. It is a new book. It is not an anthology but a personal testament.

It is an invitation to you, reader, to spend a week with me—seven days of vacation beside my soul, hoping that my soul might become yours.” Manuel Vilas, One Single Life

“A shattering read.” Juan José Millás

“His lyricism springs from the everyday to address the universal themes that most affect human beings.” Andrés González-Barba, ABC

“Through verses overflowing with excess, prosaic tone, and narrative force, he turns reality into fiction through a kind of mask or persona (with traces of the accursed), without denying what is plainly autobiographical. His poems are long and verbose, often in prose. Their air is that of song—a rhythm reinforced by anaphora and chaotic enumeration.” Álvaro Valverde, El Cultural

“Each poem by the Aragonese writer is a monumental shot of full, fascinating, vertiginous life. His words quench the thirst of existence by guiding us through his world.” Jaime Roch, Levante

“Manuel Vilas’s poems have a plot, like boleros, in whose joys and misfortunes we see ourselves reflected.” Juan José Millás

“His words are as honest as a collapse. One Single Life shows Vilas at his most refined, elegant, and luminous.” Karina Sainz Borgo, ABC

“Vilas’s poetry arises from the thermodynamics of life—from the hedonism of pleasure and the joy of existence. His verses are tiled with the very substance of living, with what happens in the texture of the everyday.” Javier Ors, La Razón

“One Single Life is both literary testament and the beginning of a new ‘Great Vilas’—optimistic, open-armed to the world.” María Serrano, El Debate

“A reminder of time’s fleetingness and an invitation to live.” Rubén López, La Opinión de Málaga

“Such is Vilas’s poetry: the further it strays from the conventional path, the better; the more it escapes the channels of well-meaning logic, the more it shines—leaping across the abyss that both attracts and terrifies us.” Juan Bas, El Correo

“Manuel Vilas’s poems have a plot, just like boleros, in whose fortunes and misfortunes we see ourselves reflected. Robert Musil once said that plot is the shadow of the novel (one might as well say of poetry), just as pain is the shadow of illness. To this we might add that one cannot live without pain—but even less without shadow.

Roma should be read as the succession of shadows cast by the movements of a man trying to rediscover his soul in the hair salons, shops, markets, hotels, churches, fryers, restaurants, streets, and alleyways of the Eternal City and its surroundings. Here we find a Vilas ‘frightened, always frightened,’ who takes account of the price of everything—from battered cod to tiramisù, from roasted chestnuts to happiness itself.

Read Roma as an existential report, as a documentary poem. It is a shattering experience.” Juan José Millás

Amor is introduced by the poet himself and includes, in addition to all his previously published collections, an anthology of poems from the author’s early period (written between 1988 and 1998) and a series of unpublished poems belonging to a new book still in progress (2009–2010).

Amor is, therefore, the collected poetry of Manuel Vilas—a book of books that preserves a fertile sense of unity, where vitalist realism and the expression of the contemporary world will leave no reader indifferent.

The reader holds in their hands the collected poetry of Manuel Vilas (Barbastro, Huesca, 1962), covering a period from 1980 to 2018. Gathered here are all of the author’s essential books.

This complete edition of his poetry, introduced by the poet himself, includes major new material, such as two sections of previously unpublished poems: Avenida de Madrid, which brings together poems written in the early years of the twenty-first century, and Materia, which contains the poem Creo, published here in book form for the first time.

Another remarkable feature of this volume is the thorough revision of Vilas’s early period, including poems written in 1980 from a little-known collection entitled El sauce (The Willow), composed when the poet was seventeen, along with a carefully revised edition of his poetry up to 1998.

This is the definitive edition of one of the most important, innovative, and essential poets writing today in Spanish—a poet who, like no other, has managed to reflect the reality of our world and to give poetry back to the people.

17th Generación del 27 International Poetry Prize

The Sinking is Manuel Vilas’s most personal and devastating book of poems. The poems in The Sinking lay bare an autobiographical and existential crisis. Yet the representation of contemporary Spain—with all its political and economic troubles—is also ever-present.

 As always in Manuel Vilas’s literary vision, the exploration of the material world and the tensions between wealth and poverty play a central role in this poetry. The creation of mysterious, allegorical characters is another of the book’s most remarkable achievements.

Good old Vilas loves the thrill of it. Between 2008 and 2013—the five years encompassed in Listen to Me—he chronicled his days online: first on his blog, then (above all) on Facebook, where he began to experiment with his writing.

A new format, one in which author and authorship blur together, inviting us to wonder whether a new literary genre is being born—or whether the difference lies more in the medium than in the message, which remains purely vilasian: funny, luminous, and wild.

It’s a project in which the reader has the final say, transformed into reader-editor-almost-author, rejecting and applauding in real time. And here we have a writer who writes even when he believes he isn’t writing—minimizing the word processor only to keep writing on the screen, knowingly or not, just to try, to disconnect, to keep writing, writing.

Good old Vilas likes to have a good time. Welcome to the party!

33rd Ciudad de Melilla International Poetry Prize

In Gran Vilas, even the title signals yet another twist in that unsettling relationship between life and literature that Vilas himself has invented. The book is structured in three intense chapters: Exaltation, Democracy, and City Vilas. If it were an epic poem — and perhaps it is — we might call them three cantos.

There is politics, ideology, love, ferocity, cities, fullness, darkness, holiness, death, and truth in the poems of Gran Vilas. But above all, there is humanity and offering.

In the wake of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Manuel Vilas explores in Gran Vilas the moral limits of our contemporary lives, of our historical present. He does so through a free, fervent, and vital expressionism, with his own identity as the stage, the chant, the joy — and the breath — of the poem.

“In all likelihood, I would never have become a writer if I hadn’t read Franz Kafka—or if Franz Kafka’s work did not exist. If I try to erase Kafka’s work from my soul, I’m left without a literary vocation. […]

My first recommendation is to read, as a starter, Kafka’s three long narratives: Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, in that order. And then the Diaries, the short stories, Letter to His Father, the correspondence—in short, the complete works. Kafka lovingly commands you to read his entire oeuvre. He doesn’t actually command it; you simply feel that need, for one very simple reason: every sentence Kafka wrote is a miracle of life. That’s why you end up reading not only all his works, but everything that has ever been written about him.”

A vivid, astonished account of the United States by one of the most lucid writers of our time.

America is the result of a journey, a daydream, and a state of endless agitation. It is a story filled with wonder before the immense vastness of a nation—the United States—that has the proportions of an entire planet, a place where everything fits. America is the depiction of a mythical space: contradictory, beautiful, and always excessive.

Manuel Vilas’s journey through this space is a sentimental and hallucinatory drift across cities where no one goes—or where everyone goes—through ghost motels, endless highways, forests, bars, shops, and small towns with a single street and a church. It is also a voyage through memory, where rock singers, writers, artists, pop icons, forgotten old stars, and even The Simpsons parade by as metaphors for the new American way of life.

In this expanded edition, which includes Vilas’s most recent long stays in the United States, the reader witnesses the violence of a polarized society—an America in cultural and political crisis, with a figure like Donald Trump straining the limits of democracy—and yet one that Vilas knows how to interpret through literature and imagination.

An unusual book by a magnificent author.

Lou Reed Was Spanish is both a travel book and a memoir. It is a believable and wildly imaginative reconstruction of biographical episodes from the life of a rock star, and also a tender, approximate reconstruction of moments from the life of a poetry star. It is prose poem and musical prose; guitar and high-proof literature. Two vital destinies that never met, yet were kindred. It is a long love letter from a cosmopolitan writer who understands that the Spanish mythology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is shaped as much by Luis Buñuel as by Jim Morrison, as much by Pablo Picasso as by Lou Reed. That literature is life, tradition, and rock and roll. Let the party begin—its abysmal sadness, its Dionysian joy—this journey.

Welcome to the marvelous world of Manuel Vilas. And welcome, in parallel, to Lou Reed’s hallucinatory journeys through Spain. For this book is two books, spliced together like a single film: on one side, a young Manuel Vilas in his native Barbastro, in the Francoist 1970s, hearing the voice of the American rock star and experiencing a revelation, an epiphany; on the other, Lou Reed himself, traveling through Spain to offer his concerts and to discover a country both dark and luminous.