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I have become increasingly enamored with Enrique Vila-Matas as I’ve been nearing the final pages of his new book Never Any End to Paris, just published by New Directions. Vila-Matas has published two other books through New Directions, Bartleby & Co. and Montano’s Malady, the former being one of my favorite novels. Not since first reading W.G. Sebald have I found an author who has so spectacularly written fiction as non-fiction. Never Any End to Paris is ostensibly written in the form of a three-day lecture delivered by a character named Enrique Vila-Matas on his adolescence spent in Paris as an ersatz-bohemian-cum-struggling writer. The lecture also encompasses ongoing discussions on irony, a variety of personnage à clefs that include Perec, Barthes, Burroughs, among others, and the narrator’s obsession with Ernest Hemingway (the book’s title comes from a line in A Moveable Feast).  He brings these elements together deftly with the learnedness of Borges, the restlessness of Bernhard and the absurdity of Gombrowicz, and something completely new and utterly Vila-Matas’ own –– hopefully the beginnings of something new in 21st literature. But enough hyperbole: read the books, and if you need further convincing, read these two pieces (a review and essay), both by Scott Esposito, and look for his forthcoming interview with Vila-Matas to be published by the Paris Review.   —Sebastian Castillo