Natasha Wimmer

From the Publisher: In this remarkably nuanced novel, both a gripping detective story and a passionate, devastating tale of eros and insanity in Colombia, internationally acclaimed author Laura Restrepo delves into the minds of four characters. There's Agustina, a beautiful woman from an upper-class family who is caught in the throes of madness; her husband Aguilar, a man passionately in love with his wife and determined to rescue her from insanity;...

A 1599 Roman tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo represents the way the world changed in their times, in a novel that goes from the execution of Anne Boleyn to Mexico after the conquest.

"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...

"Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into enduring fiction is unmistakable in these three exhilarating 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...

Follows Amalfitano, exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter, as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town, that Amalfitano meets Arcimboldi, a magician and writer whose work highlights the provisional and fragile nature of literature and life.

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...