Written Lives: Essays
081121611X
9780811216111
Description:
In addition to his own busy career as "one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers" (TLS), Javier Marías is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of Written Lives. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, "or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives." Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Brontë, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear ("all fairly disastrous individuals"), and "almost nothing" in his stories is invented.
Like Isak Dinesen (who "claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away"), Marías has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making "the highly improbable assertion that he is 'as American as April in Arizona,'" as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, "remarking cheerfully, 'I am dying beyond my means.'" Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared "to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp." Affection glows in the pages of Written Lives, evidence, as Marías remarks, that "although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun."
Best prices to buy, sell, or rent ISBN 9780811216111
Frequently Asked Questions about Written Lives: Essays
The price for the book starts from $21.48 on Amazon and is available from 8 sellers at the moment.
If you’re interested in selling back the Written Lives: Essays book, you can always look up BookScouter for the best deal. BookScouter checks 30+ buyback vendors with a single search and gives you actual information on buyback pricing instantly.
As for the Written Lives: Essays book, the best buyback offer comes from and is $ for the book in good condition.
The Written Lives: Essays book is in very low demand now as the rank for the book is 2,283,049 at the moment. A rank of 1,000,000 means the last copy sold approximately a month ago.
The highest price to sell back the Written Lives: Essays book within the last three months was on December 23 and it was $1.52.