Books by Roberto Bolano
2666
Uno de los 10 libros del año del New York Times Book Review
Cuatro académicos tras la pista de un enigmático escritor alemán; un periodista de Nueva York en su primer trabajo en México; un filósofo viudo; un detective de policía enamorado de una esquiva mujer —estos son algunos de los personajes arrastrados hasta la ciudad fronteriza de Santa Teresa, donde en la última década han desaparecido cientos de mujeres.
Publicada póstumamente, la última novela de Roberto Bolaño no sólo es su mejor obra y una de las mejores del siglo XXI, sino uno de esos excepcionales libros que trascienden a su autor y a su época para formar parte de la literatura universal.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008 Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008 Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008 San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008 Seattle Times Best Books of 2008 New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008
Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.
In the words of The Washington Post, "With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals."
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2666
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa―a fictional Juárez―on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
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$29.00
Distant Star
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions.
For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.")
Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolano."
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Distant Star
"[One of] his masterpieces." - Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review
Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once a quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile's young poetry scene.
But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as the new regime's leading poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weider's dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation among his old poetry friends. Where did this monstrous talent suddenly spring from? And how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins?
Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrator's attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation.
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$17.00
2666: A Novel
THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM “ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS” (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
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Los detectives salvajes / The Savage Detectives: Spanish-language edition of The Savage Detectives (Spanish Edition)
“Una obra maestra”. —The New Yorker
Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima, dos quijotes modernos, salen tras las huellas de Cesárea Tinajero, la misteriosa escritora desaparecida en México en los años posteriores a la revolución. Esa búsqueda —el viaje y sus consecuencias— se prolonga durante veinte años, bifurcándose a través de numerosos personajes y continentes, Con escenarios como México, Nicaragua, Estados Unidos, Francia y España, y personajes entre los que destacan un fotógrafo español a punto de la desesperación, un neonazi, un torero mexicano jubilado que vive en el desierto, una estudiante francesa lectora de Sade, una prostituta adolescente en permanente huida, un abogado gallego herido por la poesía y un editor mexicano perseguido por unos pistoleros, Los detectives salvajes es una novela donde hay de todo: amores y muertes, asesinatos y fugas, manicomios y universidades, desapariciones y apariciones.
Los detectives salvajes es la novela que lanzó a Roberto Bolaño a la fama literaria internacional antes de que 2666 estableciera su reputación para siempre. El libro ganó el Premio Herralde de Novela y el Premio Rómulo Gallegos, y fue uno de los libros del año para The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times y The New York Times Book Review.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
A National Bestseller
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
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Nocturno de Chile/ By Night in Chile (Spanish Edition)
Una imprescindible y escalofriante novela donde el talento del autor de 2666 y Los detectives salvajes brilla en todo su esplendor. Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, sacerdote y crítico literario, miembro del Opus Dei y poeta mediocre, convencido de que está a punto de morir, revisa en una sola noche de fiebre alta los momentos y personajes más importantes de su vida. Pero a medida que la noche avanza su fiebre va remitiendo y el delirio se atenúa con la aparición de los monstruos de su pasado. Así van desfilando por el libro una serie de personajes pintados con el surrealismo típico de Bolaño: los ambiguos Oido y Odeim; un pintor guatemalteco que se deja morir de inanición en el París de 1943; Farewell, el pope de la crítica literaria chilena; María Canales, una mujer misteriosa en cuya casona de las afueras se reúne lo más granado de la literatura; y el general Pinochet, a quien Urrutia Lacroix dio clases de marxismo.
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The Savage Detectives: A Novel
The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.
National Bestseller
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
Copies
-
$23.00
The Savage Detectives: A Novel
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
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2666 - 3-Volume Boxed Set: A Novel
THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa―a fictional Juárez―on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
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Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas
One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature
Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo Belano--Bolaño's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors" takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.
These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.
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Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas
One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature
Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo Belano--Bolaño's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors" takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.
These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.
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The Spirit of Science Fiction: A Novel
From a master of contemporary fiction, a tale of bohemian youth on the make in Mexico City
Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world--or sacrifice themselves to it. Roberto Bolaño's The Spirit of Science Fiction is a story of youth hungry for revolution, notoriety, and sexual adventure, as they work to construct a reality out of the fragments of their dreams.
But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions. Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction and dreams of cosmonauts and Nazis. Meanwhile, Remo runs headfirst into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city's labyrinthine streets, rundown cafés, and murky bathhouses.
This kaleidoscopic work of strange and tender beauty is a fitting introduction for readers uninitiated into the thrills of Roberto Bolaño's fiction, and an indispensable addition to an ecstatic and transgressive body of work.
Copies
No copies available.
The Spirit of Science Fiction: A Novel
From a master of contemporary fiction, a tale of bohemian youth on the make in Mexico City
Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world--or sacrifice themselves to it. Roberto Bolaño's The Spirit of Science Fiction is a story of youth hungry for revolution, notoriety, and sexual adventure, as they work to construct a reality out of the fragments of their dreams.
But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions. Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction and dreams of cosmonauts and Nazis. Meanwhile, Remo runs headfirst into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city's labyrinthine streets, rundown cafés, and murky bathhouses.
This kaleidoscopic work of strange and tender beauty is a fitting introduction for readers uninitiated into the thrills of Roberto Bolaño's fiction, and an indispensable addition to an ecstatic and transgressive body of work.
Copies
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Amulet
A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books).
As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are: "And that song is our amulet."
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Amulet
A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books).
As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are: "And that song is our amulet."
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Amulet
“An enthralling and haunting ode to youth, life on the margins, poetry and poets, and Mexico City.” —Francisco Goldman
Auxilio Lacouture is the mother of Mexican poetry. Uruguayan by birth, Mexican by destiny, the vagrant poetess serves as guardian, confidant, literary mentor, and occasional lover to a generation of Mexico City’s mad young poets, a fixture in their heady bohemian swirl. On the infamous day in 1968 when the military invades the campus of the city’s main university, Auxilio is in the women’s bathroom of the department of literature and philosophy, reading the poetry of Pedro Garfias on the toilet. Trapped and alone, she hides there for twelve days, her life’s story, past and future, pouring from her in a great deluge. Hallucinatory and prophetic, Roberto Bolaño's Amulet is a haunting, spellbinding meditation on violence and exile, on memory and history—a requiem for a lost generation.
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By Night in Chile
A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia. As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel―Roberto Bolano's first work available in English―recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study "the disintegration of the churches," a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned―after the destruction of Allende―the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.
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By Night in Chile
A Novel Following A Priest And A Literary Critic Through Chile's 1973 Coup D'etat And Consequent Military Dictatorship-- Provided By Publisher.
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$16.00
Last Evenings on Earth
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid.
In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolano writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died."
Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.
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Last Evenings on Earth
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid.
In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolaño writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died."
Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolaño's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.
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The Secret of Evil
A collection that gathers everything Bolano was working on before his untimely death.
A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano’s son Gerónimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory...
The various pieces in the posthumous Secret of Evil extend the intricate, single web that is the work of Roberto Bolano.
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The Secret of Evil
The brightest gleamings from Bolano’s unpublished fiction A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul, the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano’s son Gerónimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory …
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini-encyclopedia of nonexistent Nazi literature in our hemisphere by Roberto Bolano: "his generation's premier Latin-American writer" (The New York Times).
A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Composed of short biographies about imaginary writers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the USA, Nazi Literature in the Americas includes descriptions of the writers' works, cross references, a bibliography, and also an epilogue ("For Monsters"). All the writers are carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. There are fourteen thematic sections with titles such as "Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment," "Magicians, Mercenaries and Miserable Individuals," and "North American Poets."
Brisk and pseudo-academic, Nazi Literature in the Americas delicately balances irony and pathos. Bolano does not simply use his writers for target practice: in the space of a few pages he manages to sketch character portraits that are often pathetically funny, sometimes surprisingly moving, and, on occasion, authentically chilling. A remarkably inventive, funny, and disquieting sui generis novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas offers a clear view into the workings of one of the most extraordinarily fecund literary imaginations of our time.
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
"Imaginative, full of a love for literature, and . . . exceptionally entertaining." --The Washington Post
Mass-murdering authors. Writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring. A pilot who crafts his poetry in the sky.
A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of pan-American writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Terrifyingly witty and remarkably inventive, Nazi Literature in the Americas is the virtuosic, one-of-a-kind masterpiece that brought Bolaño fame throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
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$18.00
Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Book)
A "biographical dictionary" gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolano's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.
Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).
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The Romantic Dogs
Listed as a "2009 Indie Next List Poetry Top Ten" book by the American Booksellers Association: Roberto Bolano as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet. Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolano's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."
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The Skating Rink
“He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time.” ―Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well.
A complex book, The Skating Rink’s short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: Who was murdered? Who was the murderer? Will the murderer be caught? All of these questions are answered, and yet The Skating Rink is not fundamentally a crime novel, or not exclusively; it’s also about political corruption, sex, the experience of immigration, and frustrated passion. And it’s an atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, its drifters, its businessmen, bureaucrats and social workers.
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Antwerp
Antwerp’s signature elements―crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits―mark this, his first novel, as pure Bolano. A elegantly produced, small collectible stamped cover-on-cloth edition. As Bolano’s friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarría, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolano’s enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard―which Bolano chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)―as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.
Antwerp’s fractured narration in 54 sections―voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolano” all speak―moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.
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Monsieur Pain
Roberto Bolano takes us into an odd, dark, but comic underworld in this strangely tender noir novel. A Bolano classic. The Peruvian poet César Vallejo is in the hospital, afflicted with an undiagnosed illness and unable to stop hiccuping. His wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud: the mesmerist Pierre Pain. Pain, a timid bachelor, is in love with the widow Reynaud and agrees to help. But two mysterious Spanish men follow him and bribe him not to treat Vallejo. Ravaged by guilt and anxiety, Pain does not intend to abandon his new patient, but his access to the hospital is barred and Madame Reynaud mysteriously leaves Paris. Another practitioner of the occult sciences enters the story (working for Generalissimo Franco, using his mesmeric expertise to interrogate prisoners) ― as do Mme. Curie, tarot cards, an assassination, and nightmares. Meanwhile, a haunted Monsieur Pain wanders the crepuscular, rainy streets of Paris. . . .
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Monsieur Pain
Occult sciences, César Vallejo, WWII, hopeless love, and a final “Epilogue for Voices”: Monsieur Pain is a hallucinatory masterwork by the great Roberto Bolano. Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet César Vallejo is in the hospital, afflicted with an undiagnosed illness, and unable to stop hiccuping. His wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud: the Mesmerist Pierre Pain. Pain, a timid bachelor, is in love with the widow Reynaud, and agrees to help. But two mysterious Spanish men follow Pain and bribe him not to treat Vallejo, and Pain takes the money. Ravaged by guilt and anxiety, however, he does not intend to abandon his new patient, but then Pain’s access to the hospital is barred and Madame Reynaud leaves Paris…. Another practioner of the occult sciences enters the story (working for Franco, using his Mesmeric expertise to interrogate prisoners)―as do Mme. Curie, tarot cards, an assassination, and nightmares. Meanwhile, Monsieur Pain, haunted and guilty, wanders the crepuscular, rainy streets of Paris...
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The Skating Rink (New Directions Paperbook)
A phenomenally unusual three-way murder mystery. With a murder at its heart, Roberto Bolano’s The Skating Rink is, among other things, a crime novel. Murder seems to have exerted a fascination for the endlessly talented Bolano, who in his last interview, according to The Observer, “declared, in all apparent seriousness, that what he would most like to have been was a homicide detective.”
Set in the seaside town of Z, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink is told in short, suspenseful chapters by three male narrators, and revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. A ruined mansion, knife-wielding women, political corruption, sex, and jealousy all appear in this atmospheric chronicle of a single summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, businessmen, immigrants, bureaucrats, social workers, and drifters.
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Antwerp (New Directions Pearls)
Bolano’s radical first novel makes its paperback debut as a New Directions Pearl.
Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolano’s enterprise in prose; all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard―which Bolano chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)―as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.
Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolano.” Antwerp’s fractured narration in fifty-four sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.
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The Insufferable Gaucho
These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat. The stories in The Insufferable Gaucho ― unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire ― might concern a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly Argentine lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the familye state on the Pampas, now gone to wrack and ruin. These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.
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The Insufferable Gaucho
“Excellent . . . ‘The Insufferable Gaucho’ is one of Bolaño’s most powerful fictions.” ―The New York Times Book Review
An aging Buenos Aires judge retires to the family ranch in the Pampas to battle feral rabbits and reclaim the dignity of the gaucho life. A detective investigates a series of grisly murders―among his fellow sewer rats. An obscure Argentinian novelist journeys to Paris to face down the filmmaker who has been plagiarizing his work for years. Riffing on Borges and Kafka yet utterly and inimitably Bolaño, the stories of The Insufferable Gaucho are a testament to his mastery of the short form. Plus: two of his most provocative and piercing essays, crackling with his signature black humor and incomparable powers of perception and critique.
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Tres
“Poetry is braver than anyone,” Roberto Bolan~o believed, and the proof is here in Tres, his most inventive and bracing poetry collection. Roberto Bolan~o’s Tres is a showcase of the author’s willingness to freely cross genres, with poems in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. As the title implies, the collection is composed of three sections. “Prose from Autumn in Gerona,” a cinematic series of prose poems, slowly reveals a subtle and emotional tale of unrequited love by presenting each scene, shattering it, and piecing it all back together, over and over again. The second part, “The Neochileans,” is a sort of On the Road in verse, which narrates the travels of a young Chilean band on tour in the far reaches of their country. Finally, the collection ends with a series of short poems that take us on “A Stroll Through Literature” and remind us of Bolan~o’s masterful ability to walk the line between the comically serious and the seriously comical.
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The Unknown University
A deluxe edition of Bolano’s complete poetry Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolano touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which “you become infinitely small without disappearing.” When asked, “What makes you believe you’re a better poet than a novelist?” Bolano replied, “The poetry makes me blush less.” The sum of his life’s work in his preferred medium, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolano’s gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. “Poetry,” he believed, “is braver than anyone.”
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A Little Lumpen Novelita
Published in Spain just before Bolano’s death, A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a fierce and tender love of women “Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome. Orphaned overnight as a teenager―“our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us”―she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, and drifts into bad company. Her younger brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns how low she can fall. Electric, tense with foreboding, and written in jagged, propulsive chapters, A Little Lumpen Novelita delivers a surprising, fractured fable of seizing control of one’s fate.
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A Little Lumpen Novelita
A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women.
“Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita.
Orphaned overnight as a teenager―“our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us”―she drops out of school and gets a crappy job. At night, she is plagued by a terrible brightness, and soon she drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can fall even lower…
Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita―one of the last novels Roberto Bolano published―delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of one’s fate.
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Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles And Speeches, 1998-2003
Now in paperback ― the sole collection of the great Chilean writer’s essays Between Parentheses collects Roberto Bolano’s nonfiction: fiercely opinionated articles, speeches, essays, and talks, as well as most of the newspaper columns he wrote during the last five years of his life, when fame had come to him at last. Here we have a tender account of his return to Chile, reflections on family life, impassioned takes on books by writers Bolano admired (or vehemently despised), and advice on how to write a short story. Between Parentheses fully lives up to Bolano’s own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity on all levels.”
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Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles And Speeches, 1998-2003
The essays of Roberto Bolano in English at last. Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. “Taken together,” as the editor Ignacio Echevarría remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography.’” Bolano’s career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolano also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his “ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior”: he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels.”
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The Third Reich: A Novel
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war-game champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent his summers as a child. There, they meet another vacationing German couple, who introduce them to the darker side of the resort town's life. Soon Udo is enmeshed in a round of the Third Reich, his favorite World War II strategy game, with a shadowy local called El Quemado. As the game draws to its conclusion, Udo discovers that the outcome may be all too real.
Written in 1989, The Third Reich is Roberto Bolaño's stunning exploration of memory and violence---and a rare glimpse at a world-class writer coming into his own.
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Woes of the True Policeman: A Novel
Author of The Savage Detectives and 2666
Crushed by a devastating scandal, university professor Óscar Amalfitano flees Barcelona for Santa Teresa―a Mexican city close to the U.S. border, where women are being killed in staggering numbers. There, Amalfitano begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings, while his daughter, Rosa, reeling from the weight of his secrets, seeks solace in a romance of her own. Yet when she finds her father in bed with Castillo, Rosa is confronted with the full force of her crisis.
What follows is an intimate police investigation of Amalfitano, leading to a finale of euphoria and heartbreak. Featuring characters and stories from The Savage Detectives and 2666, Roberto Bolaño's Woes of the True Policeman mines the depths of art, memory, and desire―and marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.
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Sergio Larrain: London
by Roberto Bolano, Agnès Sire, Sergio Larrain
In this new edition of London, including previously unpublished photographs and visual references, Sergio Larrain presents a powerful portrait of a city on the brink of a new era.
In the winter of 1958, Sergio Larrain traveled to London. He spent just a few months there, photographing subjects that interested him and embracing the shadows of the city. In the cold and damp, his images captured a tangible darkness in which he could “materialize that world of phantoms.” A few years later, he joined Magnum Photos and set off around the world, before retiring to the Chilean countryside and leaving photography behind.
The book also features a text by the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño―written in 1999 specifically to accompany these images―as well as a new essay by Agnès Sire, artistic director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, detailing Larrain’s stay in London.
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Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
With the release of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in 1998,journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer “capable of befriending his readers.” After exchanging several letters with Bolaño, Maristain formed a friendship of her own, culminating in an extensive interview with the novelist about truth and consequences, an interview that turned out to be Bolaño’s last.
Appearing for the first time in English, Bolaño’s final interview is accompanied by a collection of conversations with reporters stationed throughout Latin America, providing a rich context for the work of the writer who, according to essayist Marcela Valdes, is “a T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American letters.” As in all of Bolaño’s work, there is also wide-ranging discussion of the author’s many literary influences. (Explanatory notes on authors and titles that may be unfamiliar to English-language readers are included here.)
The interviews, all of which were completed during the writing of the gigantic 2666, also address Bolaño’s deepest personal concerns, from his domestic life and two young children to the realities of a fatal disease.
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Amberes / Antwerp (Spanish Edition)
Descrita por el propio autor como "una obra policíaca, aunque no lo parezca", Amberes fue redactada veintidós años antes de su primera publicación en 2002, y descubre al Roberto Bolaño más experimental y complejo.
A caballo entre la narrativa y la prosa poética, Amberes se compone de 56 fragmentos, 56 balas perdidas cuyo objetivo permanece oculto al lector. Como pequeños fogonazos sin orden ni concierto que solamente insinúan la existencia de una luz más cegadora, los recuerdos y divagaciones que, en voz de distintos personajes —vivos y muertos—, llenan estas páginas, nos hablan de jorobados, drogas, prostitutas, películas, escritores sin palabras, asesinatos, asesinos y asesinados.
Bamboleándose entre ficción y realidad, entre cordura y locura, el lector se enfrenta a un caso en un tablero con todas las piezas, pero sin ninguna garantía de que tenga solución.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
Bolaño's radical first novel.
Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño's fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolano’s enterprise in prose; all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard―which Bolaño chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)―as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.
Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolano.” Antwerp’s fractured narration in fifty-four sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.
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Putas asesinas / Murdering Whores (Spanish Edition)
Putas asesinas / Murdering Whores
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Sepulcros de vaqueros / Graves of the Cowboys
Una clave más del universo literario de Roberto Bolaño, uno de los escritores imprescindibles de la literatura contemporánea en español
Este volumen incluye tres nouvelles inéditas -«Patria», «Sepulcros de vaqueros» y «Comedia del horror de Francia»- en las que está presente lo mejor del genio literario del autor chileno: el Mal, la violencia, la historia, la literatura, la ironía, México, Chile, el amor, el suspense, la búsqueda... a lo que se suma alguno de sus personajes más célebres, como el ubicuo detective salvaje Arturo Belano.
"Hablar de las novelas y los cuentos de Roberto Bolaño como fragmentarios resulta parcial, puesto que cada fragmento depende de una unidad en constante movimiento, en un verdadero proceso de creación que es al mismo tiempo consolidación de un universo. (...) La imaginación desbordada, la intensidad de los sentimientos, la incisiva crítica, la febril actividad o los extraños personajes hacen de Sepulcros de vaqueros un libro enormemente atractivo y original."
Del prólogo de Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature
Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo Belano--Bolaño's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors," takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.
These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.
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Estrella distante / Distant Star (Spanish Edition)
El delirante y perturbador misterio de un impostor
El narrador vio por primera vez a aquel hombre en 1971 o 1972, cuando Allende era aún Presidente de Chile. Escribía poemas distantes y cautelosos, seducía a las mujeres y despertaba en los hombres una indefinible desconfianza. Volvió a verlo después del golpe, pero en ese momento ignoraba que aquel aviador, que escribía versículos de la Biblia con el humo de un avión de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y el poeta, eran uno, y el mismo. Y así nos es contada la historia de un impostor, de un hombre de muchos nombres, sin otra moral que la estética, dandy del horror, asesino y fotógrafo del miedo, artista bárbaro que llevaba sus creaciones hasta sus últimas y letales consecuencias.
Novela clave en la obra de Roberto Bolaño, Estrella Distante es, además de un apasionante thriller intelectual, una escalofriante investigación sobre la mentalidad fascista y sus efectos en la sensibilidad literaria.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.
The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions.
For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.")
Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolano."
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El Tercer Reich/ The Third Reich (Spanish Edition)
En El Tercer Reich Roberto Bolaño da voz a diversos personajes, disponiéndolos en una suerte de tablero en el que se libra la guerra más antigua de todas: la del nazismo, la de la decadente cultura occidental, la del ser humano contra sí mismo.
Se conoce por «juego de guerra» aquel que recrea y simula un enfrentamiento armado a cualquier nivel, sujetándose a reglas para el desarrollo del mismo. El alemán Udo Berger es campeón de esta disciplina en su país. Los juegos de guerra son al tiempo su profesión y su obsesión; ocupan su vida e invaden su pensamiento a todas horas. Incluso durante el viaje que realiza con su novia Ingeborg a la Costa Brava, donde él había veraneado en su infancia, se hace instalar una gran mesa en la habitación del hotel para pensar en las estrategias de su nuevo juego, El Tercer Reich.
Una noche, sin embargo, Udo e Ingeborg conocen a otra pareja de alemanes, Charly y Hanna, que les introducirán a un mundo oculto tras las playas y el sol. Un mundo poblado por personajes de dudosa reputación, pasados oscuros y futuros aún más enigmáticos.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town.
Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo's well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo's favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game's consequences may be all too real.
Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own—and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.
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The Return
A stunning collection of short stories - mostly dealing with the sex trade - by the late Chilean master and author of The Savage Detectives.
The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories that seem to tell what Bolaño called “the secret story,” “the one we’ll never know.” Bent on returning to haunt you, Bolaño’s tales might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or soccer, witchcraft, or a dream of meeting the poet Enrique Lihn:they always surprise. Consider the title story: a young partygoer collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor. Just as his soul is departing his body,it realizes strange happenings are afoot around his now dead body — and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolaño’s own).Copies
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The Return
“Dark, intimate and sneakily touching . . . There is gold to be found in [The Return].” —Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review
Composed of thirteen indelible stories, Roberto Bolaño’s The Return is preoccupied with ghosts: troubled souls haunting society’s margins, lovers lost to the ages, young men who no longer recognize themselves in the mirror, fresh corpses afforded no peace, departed poets who visit us in dreams. These tales capture the extremes of human experience—sex, violence, death—and the mundane acts that linger in between, with Bolaño’s inimitable mordant humor and trenchant insight into what drives us. A master of the short form, Bolaño is as interested in the act of storytelling as he is in the stories themselves: how they nestle within one another; how they shift, spread, and scatter; and how they return to us again and again.
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Roberto Bolaño: Cuentos completos / Complete Stories
Los cuentos de Bolaño condensan en el breve espacio que caracteriza las obras del género todo su universo literario, uno de los más rupturistas y personales de la literatura contemporánea en español: la literatura que lo impregna todo; la sexualidad; las vidas de seres que pese a ser comunes, transcurren entre lo cotidiano y lo extraordinario; la rebeldía de aquellos que viven en la estrecha frontera que separa el sistema de la marginalidad; el viaje como huida pero también como forma de vida; la necesidad desevelar lo incierto; la juventud; la violencia y las tramas policiales; el arte como obsesión, y la búsqueda continuada de un espacio propio en un lugar ajeno.
Pertenencientes a los títulos Putas asesinas, El gaucho insufrible, Llamadas telefónicas y El secreto del mal, y escritas durante toda su vida, las piezas narrativas que componen este libro se enriquecen y adquieren un significado diferente en el diálogo que establecen entre ellas.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
In the brief space of his short stories, Bolaño manages to condense his entire literary universe, one of the most disruptive and personal of contemporary Spanish literature: the literature that permeates everything; sexuality; the lives of characters that despite being common, live amongst the everyday and the extraordinary; the rebellion of those who live on the narrow border that separates the system from marginality; travel as an escape but also as a way of life; the need to reveal the uncertain; youth; violence and police plots; art as an obsession, and the continued search for one's own space in a foreign place.
Belonging to the collections: Murdering Whores, The Insufferable Gaucho, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Secret of Evil, the pieces that make up this book become more enriched and acquire a different meaning as they establish a dialogue amongst them.
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Roberto Bolaño: Poesía reunida / Collected Poetry (Spanish Edition)
“Escribiendo poesía en el país de los imbéciles. / Escribiendo con mi hijo en las rodillas. / Escribiendo hasta que cae la noche / con un estruendo de los mil demonios. / Los demonios que han de llevarme al infierno, / pero escribiendo.”
Bolaño se sintió siempre, en esencia, un poeta, pese a que el reconocimiento le llegó por su narrativa. Este volumen recoge, además de los publicados en La Universidad Desconocida, Los perros románticos y Tres, los poemas que aparecieron en revistas, plaquettes y volúmenes colectivos en sus comienzos literarios y que desde entonces han permanecido inencontrables.
En todos ellos ahonda en los temas fundamentales de su obra: el amor, la muerte, el exilio, la literatura... La economía expresiva, la audacia formal y temática, el vanguardismo y la tensión poética convierten a Bolaño en uno de los exponentes más singulares de la poesía contemporánea en español.
“Vio en la poesía una forma de rebeldía y una intriga existencial que engrandecía la vida. Es curioso, porque sin esa apelación a la poesía no se puede entender el conjunto de su obra. Hay poesía escondida en sus novelas y hay novelas interrumpidas en su poesía. Porque todo son palabras. Como todo son palabras, Bolaño buscó aquellas que más dolían o más decían, o más escondían, o más cercanas estaban de lo que vivió”.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
"Writing poetry in a country of idiots. / Writing with my son on my lap. / Writing until night falls / with a roar of a thousand demons. / The demons who are to take me to hell, / but writing none the less. "
Despite all the recognition that he received for his narrative work, in essence, Bolaño always saw himself as a poet. In addition to those poems published in La Universidad Desconocida / The Unknown University, Los perros romanticos / The Romantic Dogs, and Tres/ Three, this volume also collects his poems published in magazines and collections and have since remained hard to find collectables. In all of them he explores the recurring fundamental themes in his works: love, death, exile, literature ... All of these, and his poetic drive, make Bolaño a unique exponent of contemporary poetry in Spanish.
“He saw in poetry a form of rebellion and an existential intrigue that magnified life. It’s interesting that without that appeal to poetry the whole of his work would not be understood. There is hidden poetry in his novels and there are interrupted novels in his poetry. Because everything is words. As they are all words, Bolaño looked for those words that hurt the most or said the most, or hid the most, or were closest to what he was living”.
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Collected Poetry
“An epic artistic journey . . . filled with sorrows and joys and discoveries.” —Héctor Tobar, Los Angeles Times
Though he reached international literary stardom for his novels, Roberto Bolaño always considered himself, first and foremost, a poet. This volume unites more than three hundred poems, written from his youth to his final years, that probe the animating themes at the core of his oeuvre: literature, politics, exile, love, death. Audacious and sui generis, this collection reveals Bolaño’s full, extraordinary life in verse.
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Los Detectives Salvajes (edición Ilustrada) / the Savage Detectives (Illustrated Edition)
Una de las mejores novelas del siglo XXI, según el New York Times y El País en edición especial ilustrada por Luis Scafati
«No es exagerado decir que Bolaño es un genio. Los detectives salvajes deberían otorgarle la inmortalidad». Washington Post
«He sido cordialmente invitado a formar parte del realismo visceral. Por supuesto, he aceptado. No hubo ceremonia de iniciación. Mejor así».
La búsqueda en 1975 de la misteriosa escritora mexicana Cesárea Tinajero, desaparecida y olvidada en los años posteriores a la revolución, sirve de inicio a un viaje sin descanso que llevan a cabo dos jóvenes poetas latinoamericanos, Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima. Durante varias décadas y a través distintos países, su aventura transcurre marcada por el amor, la muerte, el deseo de libertad, el humor y la literatura. Símbolo de la rebeldía y la necesidad de ruptura con la realidad establecida, sus vidas representan los anhelos de toda una generación.
La obra de Bolaño conversa con el arte del ilustrador argentino Luis Scafati en esta edición especial ilustrada de una novela que ganó los premios Herralde y Rómulo Gallegos y está considerada una de las mejores novelas del siglo XXI por medios como The New York Times o El País.
ENGLISH DESCRIPTION
The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.
National Bestseller
New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.
The explosive first long work by "the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.
A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
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