Nineteen delightful stories. As is often the case with me, the title story which is available online from Two Lines was not my favorite. Wish this could stay on my shelf forever...but it's a two-week loan.
Contents: A permanent home; Sea swell; Torre del Mirador; I never go to the movies; Rosa Schwarzer comes back to life; In search of the electrifying double act; Death by saudade; The hour of the tired and weary; They say I should say who I am; Greetings from Dante; Identifying marks; The boy on the swing; An idle soul; Invented memories; Vampire in love; Modesty; Nio; I'm not going to read any more e-mails; Vok's successors. (my favorites are highlighted, but they are all good.)
Cover design by Rodrigo Corral ( )

"With this collection, Vila-Matas can join the likes of Roberto Bolaño, Severo Sarduy, and Carlos Fuentes."

From a review at the New York Journal of Books:

http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/vampire-love ( )

Nineteen stories of deception and fraud.

That headline may not capture the theme of all of the stories in "Vampire in Love", but it was certainly the first thought I had when I glanced over the book after finishing it.

"Vampire in Love" is the first English translation anthology of Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas' short fiction. If you don't think you'll remember the name, then think of it backwards as "Satam-Aliv" (within spitting distance of "Satan-Alive") as one character says when introducing himself in the story "They Say I Should Say Who I Am" (orig: ‘Me dicen que diga quién soy’). The character is a boatswain and not a writer, and this is just one of the ways that Vila-Matas finds to interject himself into his fiction, itself a deception. In that story the seaman is berating an artist for becoming famous for painting portraits of people in a part of the country he has never actually visited.

Although the title of the anthology is taken from a short story it contains, that story is not actually about vampires except in a metaphorical sense. So another deception, perhaps one to assist in the marketing, although the toothless comb on the cover mimicking pronounced canine teeth seems to wink at us to let us in on the joke.

My favourite stories here were "Sea Swell", where the author's proxy goes to dinner at the home of writer Marguerite Duras in Paris with a view to renting a room (which is something that the real-life author actually did do) and "The Boy on the Swing", where an office worker goes to dinner at retiring colleague's home and hears a surprising revelation. I got a good chuckle from "I am Not Going to Read Any More E-Mails" where the writer replies to his correspondence without actually reading it, apparently a take on composer Erik Satie's real-life methods (from whom I think composer John Cage also took his trick of answering audience questions with unrelated pre-written responses).

Trivia and Links
The stories in "Vampire in Love" were selected by the translator Margaret Jull Costa with some suggested additions by Vila-Matas himself. Jull Costa discusses the process in this interview. ( )