Roberto Bolaño

"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 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...

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Márquez of his generation. In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes—the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself—on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe.

Brilliantly rendered into English

...

Imprescindible. Apocalíptica. Única.

La novela que abrió el camino a seguir por la narrativa del siglo XXI.

Escucha ahora el mejor libro en español de los últimos 25 años según Babelia.

La ciudad mexicana de Santa Teresa -trasunto de Ciudad Juárez- atrae como un imán a los protagonistas. Cuatro críticos literarios europeos viajan hasta Sonora tras las huellas del escritor desaparecido

...

Set in Chile in the early 1970s, when Allende was still president, this novel traces the divergent paths of three young Chilean poets enrolled in a poetry workshop at university. Suffused with "the melancholy folklore of exile," the work explores poetry and politics in the years following Pinochet's coup. En el Chile de inicios de los setentas, antes del golpe militar a Salvador Allende. Un hombre de apariencia tímida y distante atrae a las mujeres...

"During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying, and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Among them are the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German novelist Ernst Junger,...

"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, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness...

"Between Parentheses" collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolaño 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.

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...