Admired by Bolaño, Ashbery, Sebald, and Coetzee, Javier Marías is widely considered one of Spain’s greatest living writers. Poison, Shadow, and Farewell brings to a close Marías’s three-part novel Your Face Tomorrow. With its heightened tensions between meditations and noir narrative, Poison, Shadow, and Farewell takes Jacques Deza back to Madrid to both spy on and try to protect his own family, and into new depths of love and loss.

Javier Marías novels are renowned for the richness of his “literary thinking” and their endlessly inventive attention to the ways in which the past impinges on the uncertainties and violence of the present. For his protagonists and narrators, acts of interpretation or translation are all we have of knowledge; and memory, in its finitude, prompts proliferations of language and desire. His novels recall the uncanny intellectual play of Borges, the black humor of Pynchon, and the meditative lyricism of Proust, but they do so in a style that is uniquely his and widely praised. He has been called “a supreme stylist” and “the most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature”. His works are not only critically praised but also hugely popular, with five million books in print and translated into thirty-four languages.

About Javier Marías
Javier Marías published his first novel The Dominions of the Wolf at the age of 17. In 1997 A Heart So White, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, won for both Marías and Costa the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best novel published worldwide in English. His other novels and story collections translated into English include All Souls (1992), The Man of Feeling (2003), and his three-volume magnum opus Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear (2004), Dance and Dream (2006), and Poison, Shadow and Farewell (2009). Javier Marías’s compendium of 26 short, witty, and telling literary profiles, Written Lives (2006), has likewise garnered much acclaim. Besides being a masterful writer of contemporary fiction, Javier Marías is renowned as a translator of American and English writing, including the poetry of W.H. Auden, Frank O’Hara, Seamus Heaney, and John Ashbery, and fiction by Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, J.D. Salinger, and John Updike. In 1979 he won the Spanish national award for translation for his version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. For the last decade, Javier Marías writes a weekly column on social, cultural, and political matters for Madrid’s largest daily, El País.

About Paul Holdengräber
Paul Holdengräber is the Director of Public Programs—known as "LIVE from the NYPL"—for The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library.

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