Alberto Manguel, author of
All Men are Liars

Alberto Manguel
Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, moved to Canada in 1982 and now lives in France, where he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre français des Arts et des Lettres. In 2000, Manguel purchased with his partner and renovated a medieval presbytery in the Poitou-Charentes region of France to house his 30,000 books, where he currently resides. He has received many prizes, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from the University of Liège. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France).
All Men are Liars
Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the brilliant South American writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on his balcony floor in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew the deceased - including those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Alberto Manguel himself - are contradictory and unreliable. Poor devil and with a troubled childhood, literary genius and irresistible seducer, ordinary bastard masquerading as hero, pure and simple impostor - those are but a few of the roles attributed to a mysterious and captivating figure in this tribute to falsehood, between the lines of which the reader must discover the only worthwhile truth: that of the fascinating homage Alberto Manguel pays to literature and its shapeshifting inventions, in which the objects of our desires are infinitely reincarnated.
Published by Riverhead Books |