To Walk Alone in the Crowd

To Walk Alone in the Crowd

Antonio Munoz Molina

Antonio Munoz Molina

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, Walter Benjamin, Melville, Lorca, Whitman . . . each a walker and city-dweller, each a collagist and chronicler, 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 classical inspirations, following their peregrinations as well as telling their stories, in a book that is part memoir, part novel, part chronicle of urban wandering.A master collagist himself, Molina here assembles overheard conversations, subway ads, commercials blazing away on public screens, snatches from books hurriedly packed into bags or shoved under one's arm, mundane anxieties, and the...
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In the Night of Time

In the Night of Time

Antonio Munoz Molina

Antonio Munoz Molina

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.Winner of the 2012 Prix Méditerranée Étranger and hailed as a masterpiece, In the Night of Time is a sweeping, grand novel and an indelible portrait of a shattered society, written by one of Spain's most important contemporary novelists.
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In Her Absence

In Her Absence

Antonio Munoz Molina

Antonio Munoz Molina

"[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class....slyly witty and luminous."--Francine Prose in O, The Oprah MagazineDuring 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...
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Sepharad

Sepharad

Antonio Munoz Molina

Antonio Munoz Molina

From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired book—at once fiction, history, and memoir—that draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story.Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Muñoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern—from Eugenia Ginsburg to Grete Buber-Neumann, the one on a train to the gulag, the other heading toward a Nazi concentration camp; from a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small Spanish town to Primo Levi bound for Auschwitz. From the well known to the virtually unknown—all of Molina's characters are voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting.Written with clarity of vision and passion, in a style both lyrical and accessible, Sepharad makes the experience our own.A brilliant achievement.
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A Manuscript of Ashes

A Manuscript of Ashes

Antonio Munoz Molina

Antonio Munoz Molina

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 Manuel's, 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 love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solana's lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime.
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Like a Fading Shadow

Like a Fading Shadow

Antonio Munoz Molina

Antonio Munoz Molina

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 files, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray's final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Muñoz Molina's first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now,...
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