Javier Marias - Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

Yes, it was best not to think and to run, run without stopping for as long as I could hold out now that I no longer felt hazy or fatigued, all my senses wide awake as if I had just risen from a long sleep, and as I went deeper into the thicket and was lost from sight and the first rumblings of thunder began, I could distinctly make out, through the wind, the sound of the venomous footsteps setting off with all the urgency of hatred to destroy me, and Ricardo’s voice shouting through the wind, “I want him now, I want him dead and I will not wait, bring me the son of a bitch’s head, I want to see him flayed and his body smeared with tar and feathers, I want his carcass, skinned and butchered, and then he will be no one and this hatred that is exhausting me will end.”

“One of the writers who should get the Nobel Prize.”

— Orhan Pamuk

“Sexy, contemplative, elusive, and addictive.”

— San Francisco Bay Guardian

“The most subtle and gifted writer in contemporary Spanish literature.”

— The Boston Sunday Globe

Javier Maríasis widely considered Spain’s greatest living writer and has been translated into 38 languages. His nine books with New Directions have been admired as “superb” ( Review of Contemporary Fiction ), “fantastically original” (Talk), “dazzling” ( The Times Literary Supplement , London), and “brilliant” ( Virginia Quarterly Review ).

Translator of Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and José Marti, Esther Allenis a professor at Baruch College (CUNY), and directs the work of the PEN Translation Fund Award.