Enrique Vila-Matas was born in Barcelona, but spent his youth in Paris, where he went “to chase Hemingway’s shadow.” There he came under the tutelage of the famous Marguerite Duras, who saw in him a future master and almost forced him to write. Today Vila-Matas is one of the most original and even eccentric Spanish writers. Among his extensive collection of literary awards is the. Romulo Gallegos, who is called the “Hispanic Nobel Prize,” the National Criticism Prize, the most authoritative French “Medici Prize.”

“Bartleby and Company” is both a novel and a richly documented essay about writers, those who quit writing for one reason or another. Vila-Matas calls them “Bartleby” - after the name of the hero of G. Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scribe,” famous for the fact that he answered any request or proposal: “I would prefer to refuse.” The company assembled by Vila-Matas includes more than eight dozen authors - both real (Cervantes, Maupassant, Rimbaud, Salinger, Pynchon, etc.) and fictional ones, and readers are in for a dizzying journey through the labyrinths of the literature of the “No direction.”