AUTHORS

Alberto Manguel

ABOUT

Alberto Manguel is the award-winning author of hundreds of works, most recently (in English) Fabulous Monsters, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions, Curiosity and All Men Are Liars. He lives in New York. Read more of his work at manguel.com.


Alberto Manguel
Columns
Hoping Against Hope

Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Hospital Reading

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Beginning at the Beginning

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Geist’s Literary Precursors

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Fist

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
How I Became a Writer of Colour

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
I Believe Because It’s Impossible

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Imaginary Places

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Imaginary Islands

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

Alberto Manguel
Columns
In Praise of Ronald Wright

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Marilla

Prince Edward Island gothic.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
The Armenian Question

"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."

Alberto Manguel
Columns
The Devil

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
The Other Side of the Ice

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
My Friendship With Rat And Mole

The books we love become our cartography.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Neighbourhood of Letters

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Pistol Shots at a Concert

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Libraries without Borders

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Metamorphoses

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Burning Mistry

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Face in the Mirror

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
A Brief History of Tags

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
A Novel for All Times

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Reading the Commedia

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Role Models and Readers

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Alberto Manguel
Columns
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Alberto Manguel
Essays
Cri de Coeur

Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Jewish Gauchos

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Idiot’s Fare

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read, Part Two

I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Images of Work

Six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honour of Jesus who (the gospels tell us) had raised their brother from the dead. Martha worked in the kitchen while Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest, to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You fret and fuss about many things, but only one thing is necessary. The part Mary has chosen is the best, and it will not be taken from her.”

Alberto Manguel
Columns
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt

Alberto Manguel
Columns
In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

Alberto Manguel
Columns
In the Shadow of the Castle

Immediately after the New Year, both my daughters became victims of the First Great Snowfall of 1999.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
In Praise of the Enemy

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Van Gogh’s Final Vision

Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

Alberto Manguel
The Shy Man

“I think of my public speeches as the shy man’s revenge.”

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Not Finishing

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Observer and Observed

Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Pictures and Conversations

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Final Answers

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour

He is one of the strangest crea

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Letter from France

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Light and Dark

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Cautionary Tales for Children

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Closing Time in the Gardens of the West

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Cooking by the Book

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Dante in Guantánamo

After fol

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Detective Samuel de Champlain

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Eldorado

Art museums and geographical exp

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Europeans

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Facing the Camera

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

Alberto Manguel
Columns
A Few Essential Words

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Being Here

In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Power to the Reader

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Reading Beyond the Grave

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Reading Up on War

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Reading at a Time of Catastrophes

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

Alberto Manguel
Columns
Reporting Lies

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.
No items found.