I think I actually groaned when I read the blurb of Bartleby & Co. I'm not a big fan of literary literature. I'm not clever enough and it usually bores me silly. But Bartleby & Co was an absolute delight! Vila-Matas is devilishly funny, and his footnotes to a novel never written are a cute way of telling tens of tiny stories. His subject is Authors who stop writing, and their reasons for giving up. It's a meditation on Writer's Block, and if that totally puts you off, don't let it. There's some fascinating details of novelists I've read, and some I'll never read, because they never put anything on paper. I particularly like the ones with the multiple identities.

It's ages since I've read anything this fun. This easily could have been a Kundera style dark introspection fest, and it was anything but. Yey!