The heavyweight champion of paradox, the pioneer of parasitical writing, the disinterrer of lost authors, the crazy godfather of the Spanish avant-garde, the crypto-torchbearer of high modernism, Enrique Vila-Matas has spent over forty years charting out a literary terrain that is all his own. His work is notorious for intensely feeding off of other texts—most notably, those written by European titans like Beckett, Joyce, and Walser—as well as for drawing liberally from his own strange life. Hovering somewhere between plagiarism and homage, autobiography and multiple personality disorder, his books push the personal essay into a novelistic form, all the while taunting us with coincidences, anecdotes, and facts that seem far too good to be true—or are they actually real?