Search results for ""author roberto bolano""

Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies in hospital, hiccupping himself to death.When the doctors struggle to offer a diagnosis, his wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud, the mesmerist and reclusive bachelor Pierre Pain. Pain, in love and eager to impress, agrees to help. But on a night that ''smells of something strange'', things soon go awry...A wonderfully oneiric novella that blends the finest of Edgar Allan Poe with Jorge Luis Borges and Bolano''s truly astonishing alchemical gifts, Monsieur Pain is a gripping noir conspiracy as rich as it is strange.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWSA surrealist nightmare, with overtones of Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler' The TimesThis marvellous little yarn is dark, mysterious and rich in surprises... If you have yet to enter the daringly kaleidoscopic labyrinth that is Roberto Bolano''s imagination, this is a lively place to begin what will

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New Year's Eve, 1975. Two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala.Their quest: to track down the mythical, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. But, twenty years later, they are still on the run. The Savage Detectives is their remarkable journey through our darkening universe. Told, shared and mythologised by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, their testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of all time.TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMERRoberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia. He could be funny, he could be literate, he could be devastating. And his writing was always unparalleled' Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of NightBolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian

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If you''re going to say what you want to say, you''re going to hear what you don''t want to hear...'A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he''s plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation.Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolaño''s best. In addition, two essays are included: provocative and often scathing, they too are alive with Bolaño''s trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWSAn exemplary literary rebel' New York Review of BooksA master of the short form' IndependentBolaño wrote

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Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.

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Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing.A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world but every door opens onto a nightmare.An experimental novella, spliced together in vignettes, Antwerp is Roberto Bolaño's first work of fiction. A personal declaration of the power of literature, to read it is to be present at the big bang' of Bolaño's enterprise into prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER''A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fan's bookshelf'' Daily TelegraphBolaño set a new speed limit for literature. He simply wrote past other authors... His books are volcanic, perilous, charged with infectious erotic energy and demonic lucidity' Benjamín Labatut, author of The Maniac

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Auxilio Lacouture is trapped.For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale: she is the Mother of Mexican poetry.A highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novella, Amulet is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl. Filled with wild, dark literary prophecies, heroic poets, mad poets, artists choked by the brilliance of youth', Auxilio's passionate narration both heartbreaking and lyrical is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño's art.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS''Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history'' The TimesRoberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become' New Statesman

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This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...'A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protégé in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. A litany unfolds, offering sixty-nine reasons why not to dance with Pablo Neruda.The melancholy folklore of exile,' as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades the fourteen haunting stories of Last Evenings on Earth. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano''s beloved failed generation,' this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolaño's immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWSMay be the most haunting and mesmerising collection I have ever read' Daily TelegraphIt is a shame that Bolaño has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the imp

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Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí's fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy and revenge.Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old masion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn't tell her is he paid for it using public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.Narrated by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous civil servant, The Skating Rink is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS''A work of intense and unrealized longing'' The New York TimesBolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian

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When Oscar Amalfitano begins an affair with one of his students, he has no idea where it will lead.More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change him for ever. Forced to flee Barcelona with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amalfitano finds himself in Santa Teresa, a sprawling, mythical town on the Mexico-US border, populated by mysterious characters and haunted by dark tales of murdered women.Returning to the the world and characters of 2666, Bolaño''s masterpiece, Woes of the True Policeman explores the the power of art, memory and desire - and marks a kaleidoscopic, lyrical and darkly humorous last act in one of the great oeuvres of world literature.TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMERHallucinatory, manic, fearful, comic... Bolaño must be read by anyone who loves the novel' HeraldWe savour all he has written as every offeri

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Roberto Bolaño dijo sobre Los sinsabores del verdadero policía que el policía es el lector, que busca en vano ordenar esta novela endemoniada.Los sinsabores del verdadero policía empezó a escribirse en los años ochenta de la mano de un Roberto Bolaño entregado aún a la poesía y desconocedor todavía del legado que había de dejar en los años venideros. El punto final a la presente obra, sin embargo, lo rubricaría veinte años después, en los últimos días de su vida.A lo largo de este período, Bolaño va recogiendo o apuntando por primera vez los nombres y los escenarios que se repetirían en otras obras como Estrella distante, Llamadas telefónicas y Los detectives salvajes. Así, desfilan por estas páginas, perdidos en la ficticia y terrible ciudad de Santa Teresa, el exiliado académico chileno Óscar Amalfitano, su hija Rosa, un sevillano a quien los rusos cortan la lengua, un escritor francés llamado Arcimboldi -que nos recuerda al literato desaparec

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It's hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving. Nicole Krauss, The Guardian Oft called the big bang of Roberto Bolaño's universe, Antwerp is his first novelor the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño's oeuvre.

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Extraordinary . . . [Bolaño's] greatest work. James Wood, The New York Times The book that catapulted Roberto Bolaño into international literary stardom, By Night in Chile is the final testimony of Sebastián Urrutia LacroixChilean priest and member of Opus Dei, eminent literary critic and failed poetas he is haunted by a shadowy figure from his past. In Urrutia's feverish last hours, a deluge of memories pours from him: of hobnobbing with Santiago's most unctuous literati; of undertaking a mission to save Europe's decaying cathedrals from existential threat by pigeon excrement; of retreating into Greco-Roman poetry during the darkest chapter of modern Chilean history; of tutoring Augusto Pinochet in Marxist theory, so that the General may better understand his enemies. Throughout he insists, with fracturing conviction, that he was always on the right side of history. A novel about high art and fascism, silence and complicity, and, ultimatel

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Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chile's young poetry scene.But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chile's leading celebrity 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 amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this 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.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWSRoberto Bolaño''s universe huge, interconnected, polyphonic is formed from the collision of a wicked sense of humour and a vast and white-hot moral fire... His oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth cent

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War-games champion Udo Berger is finally on holiday.Travelling to the Costa Brava with his long-ignored girlfriend, Ingeborg, there they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals. They have fun, see the sights, relax. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace.Desperate to solve the mystery, Udo refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. Increasingly frightened, the situation slips beyond his grasp and Udo suddenly realizes that the consequences of this game' are much more serious than he ever imagined.TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMERCapering, weird, rascally and short... The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño's first-rate efforts' The EconomistA mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated Classic Bolaño' Washington Post

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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 humour 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 20th and 21st centuries.Terrifyingly witty and remarkably inventive, this is the virtuosic, one-of-a-kind masterpiece which brought Bolaño fame throughout the Spanish-speaking world.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS''The best and weirdest kind of literary game... A strangely profound place to get lost' Financial TimesA darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, good, plodding, lunatic and terrible' London Review of Books

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Three fiercely original tales. An unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent.Roberto Bolaño''s boundless gift for shaping the chaos of reality into fiction is unmistakable across 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' finds a seventeen-year-old recruited into a secret society of artists 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.TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMERHis work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction' Sunday TimesFascinating... A rare opportunity for the reader to witness the creation of a seemingly inexhaustible body of work' El Pais

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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. 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. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city's labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses.TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMERFascinating... Achingly beautiful... It reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave' New YorkerThe Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño's fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy' Paris Review

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