To Walk Alone in the Crowd

Description

Winner of the 2020 Prix Medicis etranger I want to live on foot, by hand, by pencil, at ease, responsive to whatever I meet, loose like the air that moves around my body as I walk or like a graceful swimming stroke. I want to remain astonished. Join Antonio Munoz Molina for a walk through Madrid, Paris, London and New York, where the past and the present live side by side in the literature of newspaper headlines, billboards, casual glances and overheard conversation. This is the digital metropolis, captured in notebooks, recorded on the iPhone, where Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, Fernando Pessoa and Walter Benjamin step beside us, all of us writing the unfinished poem of the crowded city.

Antonio Munoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including To Walk Alone in the Crowd (Winner of the 2020 Prix Medicis Etranger), Like a Falling Shadow (shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2018), In the Night of Time, Sepharad and A Manuscript of Ashes. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Jerusalem Prize, Spain's National Narrative Prize, the Planeta Prize and the Principe de Asturias Prize. He lives in Madrid and Lisbon.

'A word-drunk ramble through the modern city, echoing literary predecessors from Baudelaire to Poe' - Wall Street Journal 'Molina is a true original' - Salman Rushdie 'Brilliant, erudite, absorbing, moving' - 4columns.org 'Tolstoyan in its scale, emotional intensity and intellectual honesty.' - Economist 'Spellbinding' - Washington Post