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  • Published: 3 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446450123
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

While the Women are Sleeping




'The world looks different, people speak and act differently after you have read his work' (Allan Massie, Scotsman): a creepy, disturbing and sharply brilliant short story collection from the masterful Javier Marías.

Celebrated as one of the greatest writers of his time, Javier Marías is best known for his spy trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, which has been compared to Proust and hailed as one of the great modern European novels. In his first short story collection for fifteen years, he brings together tales which span his entire writing career : haunting tales from the very edges of life.

An obscenely fat man obsessed with his much younger lover endlessly videotapes her every move, a ghost is condemned to repeatedly resign from his job, and a man of impeccable refinement meets his doppelganger at a work dinner, resulting in ghoulish life changes for both men.

  • Published: 3 November 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446450123
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

About the author

Javier Marías

Date: 2003-06-09
Javier Marias was born in 1951. His novels, short stories and essay collections have won a dazzling array of international literary awards. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages and more than five million copies of his books have been sold worldwide. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University and was recently nominated to be a member of the Real Academia de la Lengua Española. He lives in Madrid.

Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-two languages and won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious Dublin IMPAC award for A Heart So White. He is also a highly practised translator into Spanish of English authors, including Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Thomas Browne and Laurence Sterne. He has held academic posts in Spain, the United States and in Britain, as Lecturer in Spanish Literature at Oxford University.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for over twenty-five years and has translated many novels and short stories by Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American writers, including Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. She has won various prizes for her work, including, in 2008, the PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz's masterpiece The Maias, and, most recently, the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago.

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Praise for While the Women are Sleeping

[Marias] has a rare ability to haunt the imaginations of his readers. He is more than just a storyteller - he's a manipulator of the psyche who can jolt his readers into new states of perception. Quite a feat for any writer

New York Journal of Books

Clever and strange... A fascinating patchwork of characters and stories

The Times

It's a perfect book

Victoria Hislop, Easy Living

Mirroring ghosts, and doubles are all present in these haunting short stories by the celebrated Spanish author Javier Marías... Superb

Lesie McDowell, Independent on Sunday

This is a rewarding collection by one of contemporary literature's masters

Alex Rayner, Guardian

The mannered, precise prose is typically well crafted and the observational comedy at its sharpest. . . Marias thrives in the domain of the mild macabre

Times Literary Supplement
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