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 choirboy. 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 who has left his wife; he visits the oculist's villa and is privy to a secret. The stories in Vampire in Love, selected and brilliantly translated by the renowned translator Margaret Jull Costa, are all told with Vila-Matas's signature erudition and wit and his provocative questioning of the interrelation of art and life.

Contents:               

A permanent home -- Sea swell -- Torre del Mirador -- I never go to the movies -- -- Rosa Schwarzer comes back to life -- In search of the electrifying double act -- -- Death by saudade -- The hour of the tired and weary -- They say I should say who I am -- Greetings from Dante -- Identifying marks -- The boy on the swing -- An idle soul -- Invented memories -- Vampire in love -- Modesty -- Nio -- I'm not going to read any more e-mails -- Vok's successors.