Javier Aparicio Maydeu (1964) holds a PhD in Spanish philology. He is professor of Spanish literature and comparative literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and associate dean of the faculty of humanities and head of the masters program in publishing at IDEC-Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He is a literary critic for El País. His publications include two volumes of criticism of contemporary world fiction: Lecturas de ficción contemporánea. De Kafka a Ishiguro (Cátedra, 2008) and El desguace de la tradición. En el taller de la narrativa del siglo XX (Cátedra, 2011).