Roberto Bolaño

An American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interact in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared.

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

...

"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...

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...

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...

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 Cesarea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. La novela narra la búsqueda de la poetisa mexicana Cesárea Tinajero, por parte de dos jóvenes poetas fundadores...

"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.

Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile . The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becomingthe "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafes and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Bolaño (Bolaño's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well...