Books by Antonio Munoz Molina

Sepharad Pa

by Antonio Munoz Molina

From one of Spain's most celebrated writers, an extraordinary, inspired book―at once fiction, history, and memoir―that draws on the Sephardic diaspora, the Holocaust, and Stalin's purges to tell a twentieth-century story.

Shifting seamlessly from the past to the present and following the routes of escape across countries and continents, Muñoz Molina evokes people real and imagined who come together in a richly allusive pattern―from Eugenia Ginsburg to Grete Buber-Neumann, the one on a train to the gulag, the other heading toward a Nazi concentration camp; from a shoemaker and a nun who become lovers in a small Spanish town to Primo Levi bound for Auschwitz. From the well known to the virtually unknown―all of Molina's characters are voices of separation, nostalgia, love, and endless waiting.

Written with clarity of vision and passion, in a style both lyrical and accessible, Sepharad makes the experience our own.

A brilliant achievement.

A Manuscript of Ashes

by Antonio Munoz Molina

It’s the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco’s dictatorship: Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel’s country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of Manuel’s, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana.
The country house is full of traces of the poet—notes, photographs, journals—and Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solana’s lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime.

Like a Fading Shadow: A Novel

by Antonio Munoz Molina

A hypnotic novel intertwining the author’s past with James Earl Ray’s attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr.

The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media’s confusion about his location and his image on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities.

Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray’s final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Muñoz Molina’s first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Muñoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person’s eyes.

Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.

In The Night Of Time

by Antonio Munoz Molina

October 1936. Spanish architect Ignacio Abel arrives at Penn Station, the final stop on his journey from war-torn Madrid, where he has left behind his wife and children, abandoning them to uncertainty. Crossing the fragile borders of Europe, he reflects on months of fratricidal conflict in his embattled country, his own transformation from a bricklayer’s son to a respected bourgeois husband and professional, and the all-consuming love affair with an American woman that forever alters his life.

Winner of the 2012 Prix Méditerranée Étranger and hailed as a masterpiece, In the Night of Time is a sweeping, grand novel and an indelible portrait of a shattered society, written by one of Spain’s most important contemporary novelists.

In Her Absence: A Novel

by Antonio Munoz Molina

"[A] translucent novel of passion, illusion and social class....slyly witty and luminous."
—Francine Prose in O, The Oprah Magazine

During working hours, Mario is a dutiful bureaucrat, scrupulously earning his paycheck as an employee of the provincial Spanish town where he lives. But when he walks through the door of his apartment, he is transformed into the impassioned lover of Blanca, the beautiful, inscrutable wife he saved from the brink of personal crisis. For the love of Blanca, Mario eats sushi and carpaccio, nods in feigned understanding at experimental films, sits patiently through long conversations with her avant-garde friends, and conceals his disgust at shocking art exhibits.

Then, little by little, a strange and ominous threat begins to weigh on the marriage.

How can love survive its own disappearance? The desperate answer that Antonio Muñoz Molina proposes in this short, circular novella is a model of literary strategy and style, a splendid homage to Flaubert.

Your Steps on the Stairs: A Novel

by Antonio Munoz Molina

A couple’s new life in Lisbon unravels in this heady and unsettling psychological thriller from one of Spain’s most celebrated writers.

A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their new home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, the man revels in the Portuguese capital’s temperate weather and the neighborhood’s calmness, meticulously planning the details of their future.

Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can’t explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings?

A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, Your Steps on the Stairsexplores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Muñoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.

Brassai

by Peter Galassi, Antonio Munoz Molina, Stuart Alexander

Brassai was the first great chronicler of the urban underbelly
This sumptuous Brassai overview gathers outstanding prints of his finest and most popular photographs, drawing on the Estate Brassai in Paris and the collections of leading museums in France and the United States. The work is organized into 18 thematic groupings, such as “Paris by Night,” “Portraits” and “Self-Portraits,” “Body of a Woman,” “Graffiti,” “Places and Things,” “Pleasures” and “The Street,” focusing throughout on his celebrated depictions of 1930s Paris.
When Brassai took up photography in the late 1920s, after his move to Paris in 1924 (from his native Brassov in Austria-Hungary, via Budapest and Berlin), the photobook was blossoming as a new art form ripe for exploration. Brassai gave the genre one of its undisputed classics, Paris de nuit (1933)―the first in what is now a long line of photobooks portraying cities by night. The book was popular with both cognoscenti and tourists, and made Brassai famous; he became the first great chronicler of the urban underbelly, with images of prostitutes, gangsters, brothels and night clubs.
Today Brassai is canonical, and easily one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century, as this 368-page volume―the most beautifully produced and edited survey of his accomplishment in print―amply attests.
Born Gyula Halász, Brassai (1899–1984) began his career as a sculptor, painter and journalist, forming friendships with artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jacques Prévert, Henri Michaux and Henry Miller, most of whom he later photographed. Brassaï published numerous great photobooks throughout his career, including Voluptés de Paris (1935), Henry Miller: The Paris Years (1975) and Artists of My Life (1982). The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Art Institute in Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art in New York have all held retrospectives of his work.

Ardor Guerrero (Novela Autobiográfica) / a Warrior's Fire (an Autobiographical Novel)

by Antonio Munoz Molina

Una memoria militar, la historia de la mili narrada por la pluma literaria de Antonio Muñoz Molina.

A finales de los ochenta, un joven Antonio Muñoz Molina ingresó en el servicio militar obligatorio. Allí fue despojado de su cabello, de su identidad, de su nombre. Pasó a ser un J-54 cualquiera en un entorno marcado por un patriotismo que veía con desapego y una intolerancia en la que no encajaba. Ardor guerrero es «una crónica memorística en la que el autor aúna su excelente y eficaz narrativa con el valor del testimonio» (El Diario Vasco).

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A military memoir--the story of conscription told through the literary voice of Antonio Muñoz Molina.

In the late 1980s, a young Antonio Muñoz Molina entered mandatory military service. There, he was stripped of his hair, his identity, and even his name. He became just another J-54 in an environment defined by a patriotism he viewed with detachment and an intolerance in which he did not belong. Ardor guerrero is "a memoir in which the author masterfully blends his exceptional narrative style with the power of testimony" (El Diario Vasco).

I Will Not See You Die

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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