Search results for ""Author Roberto Bolano""

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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The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories that seem to tell what Bolano called “the secret story,” “the one we’ll never know.” Bent on returning to haunt you, Bolano’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 Bolano’s own).

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As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolano’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolano story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot—and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano’s own). Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolano’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.

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"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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Featuring several mass-murdering authors, two fraternal writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring and a poet who crafts his lines in the air with sky writing, Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas details the lives of a rich cast of characters from one of the most extraordinary imaginations in world literature. Written with sharp wit and virtuosic flair, this encyclopaedic group of fictional pan-American authors is the terrifyingly humorous and remarkably inventive masterpiece which made Bolaño famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

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Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the ‘wizened youth’ who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.Translated by Chris AndrewsElegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

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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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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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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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An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.

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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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