Enrique Vila-Matas
Insistence as a Fine Art
Insistence as a Fine Art
Hanuman Editions #3
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DETAILS
DETAILS
Translated by Kit Schluter
Hanuman Editions
Paperback with cover
94 pp
7/23/2025
WHAT WE SAY
WHAT WE SAY
Truly pocket-sized books (just 3 x 4 inches!) of short writing from today's avant-garde. The second coming of a storied chapbook series (think Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsburg) published between India and NYC's Chelsea Hotel in the 60s/70s.
From a mind once described as “an endless labyrinth in which all forks lead to literature,” Insistence as a Fine Art trades the ekphrastic form for passage through a hall of interlocutors, mirrors, and guides (Nietzsche, Gadda, Calvino, Orson Welles). Thus Enrique Vila-Matas’ study of an artwork, Romero de Torres’s La Buenaventura (The Fortune Teller) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum’s permanent collection, swiftly becomes much more, spinning out with signature erudition into a whirlwind meditation on painting, history, and the opacity of the present tense. As one turn folds into another, voices rise and drift into a keenly elliptical flow.
