Pálido Fuego will will publish a Spanish translation of Spurious next year.

FronteiraD publish my manifesto, in Spanish.

The great Enrique Vila-Matas responds to the manifesto, in El Pais. 

Rough translation of Vila-Matas's piece (thanks Ellie!):

He says he was recently at a signing alongside a young guy who had written a book called 'A guide for bald people', and asked him what it was about. The guy unashamedly said 'it's a joke book', at which point Vila-Matas realised that he was a TV star, and that all the people queueing were there to see him. At one point this guy turned to Vila-Matas and said 'I'm here so they can see me'. And Vila-Matas thought: 'precisely.' At the exact moment that writers start to be 'seen', everything is lost.

He started thinking about the degradation of literature over the centuries, and how it's all come to this. Then he says that the end of literature is the central axis of 'Nude in your hot tub' by the young British novelist Lars Iyer. Then he summarises Lars's essay, pretty directly, so I won't translate that.

Vila-Matas says that the problem is that all people who write these days are called writers, though there's nothing else linking a writer of joke books to a writer in the old sense. Some try to explain this collapse by talking about writers' abandonment of moral responsibility, but that argument is insufficient. Though it's true that most writers today work with rather than against capitalism and market forces, it's also true that liberal democracies, by tolerating and absorbing everything, make texts useless, as dangerous as that may seem.

Everything's really already over when it comes to literature, he says, though thankfully you can still qualify that statement. Prose now is a commodity, and so, though interesting/distinguished/respected, it's irredeemably insignificant. But we still look for ways out, because now and again a writer comes along who captures the gravity of the moment, whose writing is absurd, exasperated, sick, but also authentic. These people are crazy, maniacs, the heirs of yesterday's hopeless misanthrope writers, but their works are honest and have a liberating power.

Some of these great writers: Beckett, Bernhard, Bolano. Talks about Beckett's irony, his characters' success in failure.

He quotes Lars on Bernhard. Says that losers making music for losers also points to literature's chance of survival.

Then he says: 

I'm listening to you, reader, and I won't deny that the party's almost over and that the black sky is indifferent to us all; but imagine, for a moment, that you take this last path that's left to literature. You're with the people of your own music at the last frontier, lost in the Sonoran desert, for example, at the end of all searching, or in Gatsby's gothic library, and your name is Owl Eyes and you're that guy with the thick lenses who wanders around dazed after discovering to his shock that Gatsby's books aren't fake.

Let's also suppose that there's a full moon and banjos in the garden.

"'Can't you see them?' you say. "I've checked. They're real."

Unexpected phrases like this, although charged with an exaltation at survival, make up the disturbed music of losers: phrases that are like soft, silent squalls, uttered for uncertain times, though not as uncertain as they would have us believe.