Like a Fading Shadow (First American Edition)

Molina, Antonio Muñoz

ISBN 10: 0374126909 / ISBN 13: 9780374126902

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2017

About this Item

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. First edition. First printing, with full number line. Hardcover. As new in an as new dust jacket. A clean, tight, unread copy. Publisher's original price intact on jacket flap ($27.00). Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. Octavo, 312 pages. Called a novel, this book is part fiction, part memoir, and part meditation, intertwining the story of James Earl Ray s flight to Lisbon after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. with Antonio Muñoz Molina'[s own experiences as a young writer searching for his voice. Antonio Muñoz Molina (born 1956) is a Spanish novelist and essayist, winner of the Jerusalem Prize and the Prince of Asturias Award. Translated from the Spanish by Camilo A. Ramirez.

Seller Inventory # Literature-Molina

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Like a Fading Shadow (First American Edition)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374126909
• ISBN 13: 9780374126902
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Spanish Literature

About this title

Synopsis

A hypnotic novel intertwining the author’s past with James Earl Ray’s attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr.

The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media’s confusion about his location and his image on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities.

Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray’s final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Muñoz Molina’s first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Muñoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person’s eyes.

Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.

About the Authors

Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including In the Night of Time, Sepharad, and Like a Fading Shadow. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including Spain’s National Narrative Prize, the Planeta Prize, the Medici Prize for Foreign Novel, and the Príncipe de Asturias Prize. He has been a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1995. He lives in Madrid and New York City.

Camilo A. Ramirez is a Colombian literary translator, editor, and media strategist based in New York City.