Enrique Vila-Matas 
Bartleby & Co. [EPUB ebook] 

A marvelous novel by one of Spain’s most important contemporary authors, in which a clerk in a Barcelona office takes us on a romping tour of world literature.

In
Bartleby & Co., an enormously enjoyable novel, Enrique Vila-Matas tackles the theme of silence in literature: the writers and non-writers who, like the scrivener Bartleby of the Herman Melville story, in answer to any question or demand, replies: ‘I would prefer not to.’ Addressing such ‘artists of refusal’ as Robert Walser, Robert Musil, Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Duchamp, Herman Melville, and J. D. Salinger,
Bartleby & Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself),
Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write,
Bartleby is utterly engaging, a work of profound and philosophical beauty.

Circa l’autore

Jonathan Dunne was born in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, in 1968 and studied Classics at Oxford University. He is director of the publishing house Small Stations Press. He translates from Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician and Spanish into English.