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In this “beautifully wrought” novel set in Franco-era Spain, a university student stumbles into a decades-old mystery (New York magazine). It’s the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco’s dictatorship. Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel’s country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of his uncle, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana. The country house is full of traces of the poet—notes, photographs, journals—and Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in l...
October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer's son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life. A rich, panoramic portrait of Spain on the brink of civil war, In the Night of Time details the passions and tragedies of a country tearing itself apart. Compared in scope and importance to War and Peace, Muñoz Molina's masterpiece is the great epic of the Spanish Civil War written by one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists.
Winner of the 2020 Medici Prize for Foreign Novel From the award-winning author of the Man Booker Prize finalist Like a Fading Shadow, Antonio Muñoz Molina presents a flâneur-novel tracing the path of a nameless wanderer as he walks the length of Manhattan, and his mind. De Quincey, Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman . . . walkers and city dwellers all, collagists and chroniclers, picking the detritus of their eras off the filthy streets and assembling it into something new, shocking, and beautiful. In To Walk Alone in the Crowd, Antonio Muñoz Molina emulates these classic inspirations, following their peregrinations and telling their stories in a book that is part...
"[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class....slyly witty and luminous." —Francine Prose in O, The Oprah Magazine During working hours, Mario is a dutiful bureaucrat, scrupulously earning his paycheck as an employee of the provincial Spanish town where he lives. But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits. Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage. How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Muñoz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.
A hypnotic novel intertwining the author’s past with James Earl Ray’s attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr. The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media’s confusion about his location and his image on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities. Using recently declassified FBI fil...
An “amazing” novel about the diaspora of Sephardic Jews amid the tumult of twentieth century history (The Washington Post Book World). From one of Spain’s most celebrated writers, this extraordinary blend of fiction, history, and memoir tells the story of the Sephardic diaspora through seventeen interlinked chapters. “If Balzac wrote The Human Comedy, [Antonio] Muñoz Molina has written the adventure of exile, solitude, and memory,” Arturo Pérez-Reverte observed of this “masterpiece” that shifts seamlessly from the past to the present along the escape routes employed by Sephardic Jews across countries and continents as they fled Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s purges in th...
When jazz pianist Santiago Biralbo meets the wife of an American art dealer he begins not only an obsessional love affair but an odyssey that will strip him of his identity in his quest to understand love and music. A C zanne painting; the name Burma; a jazz musician who has passed into legend and oblivion; murder; and a mysterious woman - these are just a few of the tantalizing elements that converge in Winter in Lisbon. Infused with the melodrama of film noir and the rhythms of jazz, this is a haunting exploration of the lethal extremes to which we can be driven by love, art and money.
"This book explores Antonio Muñoz Molina's creation of compelling narratives about Spain's immediate past by engaging in a dynamic dialogue with popular culture subgenres and the media. The author asserts that popular culture functions in Muñoz Molina's novels as provider of a series of strategies that represent in the text aspects of Francoism and the Transition that, because of their relevance, are part of the structure of feeling of those periods. The study focuses on the role of popular music, film, photography, the thriller, the romance novel as well as the radio and other gadgets of modern technology in Muñoz Molina's Novels. The Gaze on the Past argues that through the incorporation of popular culture in texts, Muñoz Molina undertakes a deliberate and intense reflection on memory and on the creation of historical moments, highlighting their desire to be heard." from publisher
Long-listed for The Man Booker International Prize 2018On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered by a man named James Earl Ray. Before Ray's capture and sentencing to 99 years' imprisonment, he evaded the FBI for two months as he crossed the globe under various aliases. At the heart of his story is Lisbon, where he spent ten days attempting to acquire an Angolan visa.Like a Fading Shadow traces three journeys to the city: Ray's desperate attempt to evade justice in 1968; a research trip undertaken by the young Muñoz Molina for his breakthrough novel Winter in Lisbon in 1987; and the return journey taken by the novelist as he attempts to reconstruct these twin stories from the instability of the past, and interrogates his own obsession with one of the twentieth century's most notorious figures.Aided by the recent declassification of James Earl Ray's FBI case file, Like a Fading Shadow boldly weaves a taut retelling of Ray's assassination of King, his time on the run and his eventual capture together with a highly original, fearlessly honest examination of the novelist's own past.
Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year A revelatory tale of science, adventure, and modern myth. When the writer Donovan Hohn heard of the mysterious loss of thousands of bath toys at sea, he figured he would interview a few oceanographers, talk to a few beachcombers, and read up on Arctic science and geography. But questions can be like ocean currents: wade in too far, and they carry you away. Hohn's accidental odyssey pulls him into the secretive world of shipping conglomerates, the daring work of Arctic researchers, the lunatic risks of maverick sailors, and the shadowy world of Chinese toy factories. Moby-Duck is a journey into the heart of the sea and an adventure through science, myth, the global economy, and some of the worst weather imaginable. With each new discovery, Hohn learns of another loose thread, and with each successive chase, he comes closer to understanding where his castaway quarry comes from and where it goes. In the grand tradition of Tony Horwitz and David Quammen, Moby-Duck is a compulsively readable narrative of whimsy and curiosity.