Mac and His Problem
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  • Published: 16 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780143788454
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99

Mac and His Problem

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
16 Apr 2019
EBook
16 Apr 2019
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A funny, erudite novel from one of the great European storytellers, with the process of writing and creation playfully at its heart.

Mac, over sixty and recently unemployed, lives on his wife’s earnings from her furniture restoration business. An avid reader, he decides at the age of sixty to keep a diary. Mac’s wife, Carmen, a dyslexic born of dyslexic parents, thinks he is simply wasting his time and risking sliding further into depression—but Mac persists, and is determined that this diary will not turn into a novel. However, one day, he has a chance encounter with a near neighbour, a highly successful author who once wrote a collection of enigmatic, wilfully obscure stories.…
  • Published: 16 April 2019
  • ISBN: 9780143788454
  • Imprint: Vintage Australia
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Enrique Vila-Matas

Enrique Vila-Matas is widely considered to be one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists. His work has been translated into 30 languages and has won numerous international literary prizes, including the Herralde Prize, the Prix Médicis étranger and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. Vila-Matas' books have been longlisted (Montano) and shortlisted (Dublinesque) for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Never Any End to Paris was a finalist for the US Best Translated Book Award.

portrait photo of Enrique Vila-Matas

Also by Enrique Vila-Matas

The Illogic of Kassel
Never Any End to Paris
Dublinesque
Montano
Bartleby And Co
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Praise for Mac and His Problem

Vila-Matas’s wildly original novels are all investigations of whether or not originality in fiction is still possible; every nook and cranny of literary history is explored and interrogated, the margin of every great novel frantically scribbled in.

Morten Høi Jensen, Dublin Review of Book

[Vila-Matas] charges the various tensions in his hybridized book: the artificial nature of plot and the apparent triviality of day-to-day existence, how life imitates art and art imitates life… Mac and His Problem boasts an impressive architecture.

Eric Banks, Bookforum

Vila-Matas’s bouncy prose is the highlight of this lively ride through a writer’s mind.

Publishers Weekly

Diary, essay, thriller, conspiracy theory, posthumous memoir, novel—Vila-Matas uses all the materials to construct his latest metafictional fun house.

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Mac and His Problem book club notes

This funny, erudite novel from one of the great European storytellers will have your book club dreaming of a trip to Barcelona.