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Reading lists

Where to start reading Roberto Bolaño’s books

The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolaño

Readers who have snacked on Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century

One of the greatest and most distinctive voices in modern fiction

A supernova of creativity whose light is still arriving at our shores

A master of the short form… essential – and unforgettable

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRIS POWER 
 
‘A master of the short form’ Independent 
 
Wide-ranging, suggestive, and ever-daring, Roberto Bolaño's short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels. 
 
From melancholic portraits of exile and its folklore to a rogue’s gallery of desperate characters futilely attempting to unearth the animating secrets of the world, each of Bolaño’s short fictions adds yet another door, a window, a secret passage onto the sinister, eerie universe that Bolaño brought to life across his body of work. 
 
Bringing together Last Evenings on Earth, The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho, as well as Bolaño’s posthumously published stories, this new book marks the first time these fictions have been collected in one edition, allowing for a major reappraisal of the vital place that the short story commands for Bolaño’s literary legacy. 
 
‘Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time’ Paul Auster 
 
‘Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled’ Mariana Enríquez

A Little Lumpen Novelita

'Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime' 
 
So begins Bianca&rsquo;s tale of growing up the hard way. Orphaned overnight as a teenager, she drops out of school and drifts into the bad company of two criminals her brother brings home. As the four of them plot a fantastical crime, Bianca learns she can drift even lower... 
 
Electric and tense with foreboding, A Little Lumpen Novelita - one of the last novellas Roberto Bolaño published &ndash; delivers a fractured fairy tale of taking control of one's fate. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño has proven that literature can do everything&rsquo; The New York Times 
 
&lsquo;The man was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time&rsquo; Paul Auster

One of the best books of the year–A Little Lumpen Novelita feels as substantial as a book three times as long. This is a glittering gem, as maddening and haunting as you'd expect from Bolano.

As for Bolano, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus.

Bolano has proven that literature can do everything.

The very highest level of literary achievement.

Roberto Bolano was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown, he had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results were multi-dimensional.

Roberto Bolaño (Author) Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition. Natasha Wimmer (Translator) Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her recent translations include Nona Fernández’s Voyager and Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death.

Amulet

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 &lsquo;choked by the brilliance of youth&rsquo;, Auxilio&rsquo;s passionate narration &ndash; both heartbreaking and lyrical &ndash; is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s art. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history' The Times 
 
&lsquo;Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become&rsquo; New Statesman

Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become.

A curtain-raising taster to the epic of his landmark works.

His work is the crossroads where Márquez meets Burroughs and Borges meets Mailer, resulting in a riotous dust-up.

Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history . . . spare but beautifully compacted.

A short, original, engaged and engaging novel; a good introduction to the longer works of this writer.

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 &lsquo;choked by the brilliance of youth&rsquo;, Auxilio&rsquo;s passionate narration &ndash; both heartbreaking and lyrical &ndash; is suffused with the essence of Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s art. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'Encapsulates the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history' The Times 
 
&lsquo;Roberto Bolaño redefined the form of the novel in his masterpiece 2666; with the hallucinatory narrative of Amulet, he reimagines what literature can become&rsquo; New Statesman

Antwerp

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 &ndash; but every door opens onto a nightmare. 
 
An experimental novella, spliced together in vignettes, Antwerp is Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s first work of fiction. A personal declaration of the power of literature, to read it is to be present at &lsquo;the big bang&rsquo; of Bolaño&rsquo;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&rsquo;s bookshelf' Daily Telegraph 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño 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&rsquo; Benjamín Labatut, author of The Maniac

A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fan’s bookshelf . . . the sentences whizz over your head like bullets.

It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño.

There is great value if you are already a devotee.

Cowboy Graves

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 &lsquo;Cowboy Graves,&rsquo; Arturo Belano &ndash; Bolaño's alter ego &ndash; returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. &lsquo;French Comedy of Horrors&rsquo; finds a seventeen-year-old recruited into a secret society of artists in the sewers of Paris. And in &lsquo;Fatherland,&rsquo; 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 WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
&lsquo;Fascinating... A rare opportunity for the reader to witness the creation of a seemingly inexhaustible body of work&rsquo; El Pais

The Savage Detectives may have made Bolaño’s name, but his posthumous publications—from the galactic 2666 to the winsome Spirit of Science Fiction—have cemented his legend. He left behind a vault to rival Prince’s 'Paisley Park'. . . . The effect of Cowboy Graves is less the piecing together of a puzzle than the recentering of a whole, mythic world.

Companionable, exotic, witty and glamorously suggestive.

“Bolaño readers can survey [Cowboy Graves] to glimpse into his artistic process, into the fountain of his creativity. . . . One of Bolaño’s great narrative skills is his ability to casually express the enigma of life, the lacuna between humanity’s capacity for comprehension and the world’s unknowable. . . . His writing is global and encyclopedic, curative and addictive, and vibrant and visceral.

Cowboy Graves contains writing completed over a period of 10 years, and features many of the touchstones Bolaño was known for: semi-autobiographical narration; a humorous, fragmentary style; and the sort of intrigue that grabs hold of you and never lets go, despite offering no easy answers.

Bolaño's brilliant oeuvre expands with another bright starburst, this one comprising three separate yet thematically connected novellas...Bolaño's inimitable style and searing vision will appeal to fans and new readers alike.

Each story reveals a centrifugal writer with a brilliant command of words and no fear of a plot’s getting away from him.

Monsieur Pain

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 ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;A surrealist nightmare, with overtones of Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler&rsquo; The Times 
 
This 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 be quite an experience&rsquo; Irish Times

This 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 be quite an experience.

[Monsieur Pain is] a taste of what made him such a formidable talent.

Monsieur Pain is a mystery in which the mystery remains unsolved. The novel strikes a compelling balance of lucidity and strangeness.

Bolaño creates the atmosphere of a surrealist nightmare, with overtones of Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler.

Whodunnit with no who or it and precious little dunn, but plenty to offer the lover of literary intrigue.

Roberto Bolaño (Author) Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition. Chris Andrews (Translator) Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He teaches in the department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies of the University of Melbourne. His translation of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star in 2005 won the prestigious Valle-Inclán Prize.

By Night in Chile

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 &lsquo;wizened youth&rsquo; who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;The wit, the horror, the ambition, the strangeness; Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever&rsquo; Chris Power 
 
&lsquo;Few are the writers who have mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill&rsquo; Georgi Gospodinov, author of Time Shelter

Nazi Literature in the Americas

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&rsquo; Financial Times 
 
&lsquo;A darkly comic celebration of the wilder horizons of writing, good, plodding, lunatic and terrible&rsquo; London Review of Books

The triumphant posthumous entrance of Roberto Bolaño into the English-language literary firmament has been one of the sensations of the decade.

An artful alternate history of modern literature

Lucid, insane, deadly serious, wildly playful

Roberto Bolaño: that poete maudit, irreverent and brilliant, who wrote many of the best stories and novels of his generation.

One of the most respected and influential writers of his generation... At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening.

It&rsquo;s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius

Roberto Bolaño made each book more ambitious so that it will take us many years to come to terms with his vast achievement

Last Evenings On Earth

&lsquo;This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...&rsquo; 
 
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. 
 
&lsquo;The melancholy folklore of exile,&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;failed generation,&rsquo; this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolaño&rsquo;s immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;May be the most haunting and mesmerising collection I have ever read&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
&lsquo;It is a shame that Bolaño has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature will be sorely missed&rsquo; Guardian

The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world

Bolaño's language, alert and always graceful, his way of constructing narratives that are simultaneously disconcerting, brilliant and infinitely immediate, is a form of resisting evil, adversity and mediocrity

&lsquo;Roberto Bolaño's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.&rsquo;

&lsquo;Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled.&rsquo;

&lsquo;Roberto Bolaño's fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental.&rsquo;

Roberto Bolaño mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill

For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close

It&rsquo;s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius.

&lsquo;This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...&rsquo; 
 
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. 
 
&lsquo;The melancholy folklore of exile,&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;failed generation,&rsquo; this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolaño&rsquo;s immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;May be the most haunting and mesmerising collection I have ever read&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
&lsquo;It is a shame that Bolaño has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature will be sorely missed&rsquo; Guardian

Woes of the True Policeman

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 WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Hallucinatory, manic, fearful, comic... Bolaño must be read by anyone who loves the novel&rsquo; Herald 
 
&lsquo;We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius&rsquo; Patti Smith

The most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation.

Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world

There is a power in these pages that very few writers ever achieve

Roberto Bolaño mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill.

When I read Bolaño, I think: everything is possible again

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 WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Hallucinatory, manic, fearful, comic... Bolaño must be read by anyone who loves the novel&rsquo; Herald 
 
&lsquo;We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius&rsquo; Patti Smith

The Third Reich

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 &lsquo;game&rsquo; are much more serious than he ever imagined. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Capering, weird, rascally and short... The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño&rsquo;s first-rate efforts&rsquo; The Economist 
 
&lsquo;A mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated&hellip; Classic Bolaño&rsquo; Washington Post

A perfect novel...Compassionate, disturbing, and deeply felt, it's as much of a gift as anything the late author has given us.

Think Kafka at a beach resort...For those who like their literature to make them look with fear and suspicion at even the most mundane events, The Third Reich is calling.

A brilliant first novel...all the more remarkable for its prescience.

Roberto Bolaño's fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental

Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s uncontrollable storytelling pulsion, his savage way of using adjectives, his melancholic, almost tormented urban realism, changed the tone of a whole tradition

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 &lsquo;game&rsquo; are much more serious than he ever imagined. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Capering, weird, rascally and short... The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño&rsquo;s first-rate efforts&rsquo; The Economist 
 
&lsquo;A mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated&hellip; Classic Bolaño&rsquo; Washington Post

The Spirit of Science Fiction

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&rsquo;s labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Fascinating... Achingly beautiful... It reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave&rsquo; New Yorker 
 
&lsquo;The Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño&rsquo;s fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy&rsquo; Paris Review

The novel is dappled with recognizably Bolañan pleasures

[A]n entertaining, lyrical and accomplished novel.

Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s books are volcanic, perilous, charged with infectious erotic energy and demonic lucidity

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&rsquo;s labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Fascinating... Achingly beautiful... It reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave&rsquo; New Yorker 
 
&lsquo;The Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño&rsquo;s fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy&rsquo; Paris Review

The Skating Rink

Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí&rsquo;s fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy &ndash; 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&rsquo;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 Times 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world&rsquo; Guardian

The Skating Rink&hellip;like much of what [Bolano] wrote, leaves many new novels looking pretty bland.

This Catalan drama sizzles with unrequited love and murderous ambition.

A sizzling cocktail of sex, death and obsession set on the Costa Brava.

Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever.

Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled

Roberto Bolaño offers a unique, multilayered and quirky perspective on contemporary life.

&lsquo;Latin American letters (wherever it may reside) has never had a greater, more disturbing avenging angel than Bolaño.

Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí&rsquo;s fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy &ndash; 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&rsquo;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 Times 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world&rsquo; Guardian

The Return

&lsquo;In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk&rsquo;... 
 
A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with. 
 
Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: The Return is a trove of strangely arresting short master works. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'Dark, intimate and sneakily touching... There is gold to be found in this collection' New York Review of Books 
 
&lsquo;Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts&rsquo; Observer 
 
 &lsquo;A compelling encapsulation of Bolaño's work... You won't be bored&rsquo; Los Angeles Times

'Dark, intimate and sneakily touching . . . there is gold to be found in this collection'

Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts.

The sense of embattlement that animates the writing, and the scab-picking intensity that he brings to his obsessions, makes The Return a compelling encapsulation of Bolaño's work . . . you won't be bored.

&lsquo;In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk&rsquo;... 
 
A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with. 
 
Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: The Return is a trove of strangely arresting short master works. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'Dark, intimate and sneakily touching... There is gold to be found in this collection' New York Review of Books 
 
&lsquo;Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts&rsquo; Observer 
 
 &lsquo;A compelling encapsulation of Bolaño's work... You won't be bored&rsquo; Los Angeles Times

The Insufferable Gaucho

&lsquo;If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear...&rsquo; 
 
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 ANDREWS 
 
&lsquo;An exemplary literary rebel&rsquo; New York Review of Books 
 
&lsquo;A master of the short form&rsquo; Independent 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own&rsquo; New York Times

We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius

Roberto Bolaño&rsquo;s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever

Roberto Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time.

The triumphant posthumous entrance of Roberto Bolaño into the English-language literary firmament has been one of the sensations of the decade

It&rsquo;s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño.

2666

A vast literary reckoning with disappearance, obsession and the violence threaded through modern history. 
 
Set in Santa Teresa on the Mexico US border, this literary crime novel about missing women unfolds across intersecting lives: European academics in pursuit of a reclusive writer, a journalist drawn into the city’s unrest, and a community haunted by a growing list of unsolved murders. 
 
What begins as an intellectual quest gradually reveals a deeper and more disturbing pattern. The killings of girls and women recur with numbing regularity, their investigation fragmented and inconclusive. Around them, careers advance, rivalries flare and history presses forward. The search for meaning becomes inseparable from the search for the dead. 
 
Shifting between continents and decades, the novel resists easy answers. Its scope is immense, yet its power lies in accumulation: detail by detail, case by case, it exposes the quiet machinery that allows brutality to persist.

Bolaño's most audacious performance . . . It is bold in a way that few works really are

Bolaño's masterwork . . . An often shockingly raunchy and violent tour de force

Readers who have snacked on Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño.

Roberto Bolaño's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.

Roberto Bolaño: that poete maudit, irreverent and brilliant

Samanta Schweblin, author of Mouthful of Birds

For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close.

Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex. 
 
Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But, there is a darker side to the town. Girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate. 
 
As a sense of conspiracy grows and an apocalyptic shadow draws closer, the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century history reveals itself in a novel of an astonishing scale and burning intensity. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
‘A landmark in what’s possible for the novel. Bolaño has proven it can do anything’ New York Times 
 
‘Wondrous... Unforgettable...will resonate for years to come’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘As riveting as any top-notch thriller... 2666 achieves something extremely rare in fiction: it provides an all-encompassing view of our world’ Sunday Times

The Savage Detectives

New Year&rsquo;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 WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Roberto 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&rsquo; Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world&rsquo; Guardian

The comic frenzy, the inventiveness of character and situation, and the mood-soaked depiction of 1970s Mexico is delightful.

It&rsquo;s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality.

My favorite writer . . . The Savage Detectives is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come.

Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love

An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel.

The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.

On New Year&rsquo;s Eve, 1975, two hunted men leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. 
 
Their quest: to track down the 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 WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Roberto 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&rsquo; Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night 
 
&lsquo;Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world&rsquo; Guardian

Between Parentheses

The excellent thing about Between Parentheses is how thoroughly it dispels any incenses or stale reverence in the air. It's a loud, greasy, unkeppt thing. Reading it is not like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Senor Bolano. It's like sitting on a barstool next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco.

Bolaño frolics in pithy essays on friendship, women, ancestors, and courage. He's irreverent and purposeful, cerebral and casual, insouciantly opinionated and ironic, and charming and funny.

What a refreshing surprise it is to hear Bolaño in his own words.

Bolano's judgments are a joy to read. Between Parentheses is a treasure chest: filled with odd glittering jewels and fistfuls of gold. In these essays we hear Bolano's real voice, the one he often disguised through the ventriloquism of his fiction.

One emerges from Between Parentheses with the desire to read more -- to read more Bolano, re-read Borges, to discover Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn and Carmen Boullosa.

The essays in Between Parentheses preserve for us the voice of the seasoned and accomplished Bolano, the man who, as he was whipping up these various tapas, was also tending the large pot simmering with the eventual 2666, and was very likely aware that his days were numbered. I would like to have the culture, the knowledge, that would let me enjoy his responses to his fellow writers as they were meant to be enjoyed, but even without that--and it is a considerable deficit--the collection delights. How not? Spirit, where it exists, shines through. Roberto Bolano was one of the ones for whom literature was everything.

'Between Parentheses is a treasure chest' - The Nation 
 
Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano 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: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented 'autobiography.'" 
 
Bolano's career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolano also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his "ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior" he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: "I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels."

The Collected Poems of Roberto Bolaño

A majestic, visionary and life-spanning collection of poetry from the first great classic writer of the 21stcentury, Roberto Bolano. 
 
Though he reached international literary stardom for his novels, Roberto Bolaño always considered himself, first and foremost, a poet. This volume unites more than three hundred poems, written from his youth to his final years, that probe the animating themes at the core of his oeuvre: literature, politics, exile, love, death. Audacious and unique, this collection reveals Bolaño’s full, extraordinary life in verse. 
 
‘An epic artistic journey . . . filled with sorrows and joys and discoveries’ Los Angeles Times 
 
‘Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled’ Mariana Enríquez

Roberto Bolaño

Chris Andrews

A dazzling, daring tale of poets at the end of the world, Distant Star is Roberto Bolano's miniature dystopian masterpiece 
 
Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, 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. 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. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

Roberto Bolaño

Books by Roberto Bolaño

Articles featuring Roberto Bolaño

Where to start reading Roberto Bolaño’s books

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