A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: TOP TEN

THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa--a fictional Juárez--on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

National Bestseller
A New York Times Best Book of the Twenty-First Century

The Savage Detectives is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.

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 Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.

The explosive first long work by the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

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 Lacroix--Chilean priest and member of Opus Dei, eminent literary critic and failed poet--as 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, ultimately, the weight of damnation, Roberto Bolaño's By Night in Chile is a deep-cutting satire and a work of devastating moral insight.

Dark, intimate and sneakily touching . . . There is gold to be found in [The Return]. --Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review

Composed of thirteen indelible stories, Roberto Bolaño's The Return is preoccupied with ghosts: troubled souls haunting society's margins, lovers lost to the ages, young men who no longer recognize themselves in the mirror, fresh corpses afforded no peace, departed poets who visit us in dreams. These tales capture the extremes of human experience--sex, violence, death--and the mundane acts that linger in between, with Bolaño's inimitable mordant humor and trenchant insight into what drives us. A master of the short form, Bolaño is as interested in the act of storytelling as he is in the stories themselves: how they nestle within one another; how they shift, spread, and scatter; and how they return to us again and again.

Excellent . . . 'The Insufferable Gaucho' is one of Bolaño's most powerful fictions. --The New York Times Book Review

An aging Buenos Aires judge retires to the family ranch in the Pampas to battle feral rabbits and reclaim the dignity of the gaucho life. A detective investigates a series of grisly murders--among his fellow sewer rats. An obscure Argentinian novelist journeys to Paris to face down the filmmaker who has been plagiarizing his work for years. Riffing on Borges and Kafka yet utterly and inimitably Bolaño, the stories of The Insufferable Gaucho are a testament to his mastery of the short form. Plus: two of his most provocative and piercing essays, crackling with his signature black humor and incomparable powers of perception and critique.

Uno de los 10 libros del año del New York Times Book Review
Cuatro académicos tras la pista de un enigmático escritor alemán; un periodista de Nueva York en su primer trabajo en México; un filósofo viudo; un detective de policía enamorado de una esquiva mujer --estos son algunos de los personajes arrastrados hasta la ciudad fronteriza de Santa Teresa, donde en la última década han desaparecido cientos de mujeres.
Publicada póstumamente, la última novela de Roberto Bolaño no sólo es su mejor obra y una de las mejores del siglo XXI, sino uno de esos excepcionales libros que trascienden a su autor y a su época para formar parte de la literatura universal.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008 Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008 Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008 San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008 Seattle Times Best Books of 2008 New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008

Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared.

In the words of The Washington Post, With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals.

An enthralling and haunting ode to youth, life on the margins, poetry and poets, and Mexico City. --Francisco Goldman

Auxilio Lacouture is the mother of Mexican poetry. Uruguayan by birth, Mexican by destiny, the vagrant poetess serves as guardian, confidant, literary mentor, and occasional lover to a generation of Mexico City's mad young poets, a fixture in their heady bohemian swirl. On the infamous day in 1968 when the military invades the campus of the city's main university, Auxilio is in the women's bathroom of the department of literature and philosophy, reading the poetry of Pedro Garfias on the toilet. Trapped and alone, she hides there for twelve days, her life's story, past and future, pouring from her in a great deluge. Hallucinatory and prophetic, Roberto Bolaño's Amulet is a haunting, spellbinding meditation on violence and exile, on memory and history--a requiem for a lost generation.

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 novel--or 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.

Full of moral and political urgency . . . Excellent. --Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian

In 1938 Paris, Pierre Pain, a lonely bachelor and a beleaguered mesmerist, receives a telegram from his friend Madame Reynaud. An acquaintance of hers lies in a hospital bed beset with a mysterious--and apparently terminal--case of the hiccups, and she entreats Pain to cure him. Quietly in love with Reynaud, and buoyed by her faith in him, he agrees to see the patient, the exiled Peruvian poet César Vallejo. So sets off a nightmarish and labyrinthine chain of events that sees Pain racing, breathless, through the umbrous streets of Paris: He finds himself barred from approaching Vallejo's bedside. He is trailed by a ghostly pair of Spaniards who emerge from the shadows only to bribe him not to treat the poet. He encounters a former peer, now working across the Spanish border, whose career has taken a shockingly sinister turn. A hypnotic and surreal noir, Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain takes us on a vertiginous journey through conspiracy, occultism, and the unspeakable evil looming in our midst.

Una obra maestra. --The New Yorker

Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima, dos quijotes modernos, salen tras las huellas de Cesárea Tinajero, la misteriosa escritora desaparecida en México en los años posteriores a la revolución. Esa búsqueda --el viaje y sus consecuencias-- se prolonga durante veinte años, bifurcándose a través de numerosos personajes y continentes, Con escenarios como México, Nicaragua, Estados Unidos, Francia y España, y personajes entre los que destacan un fotógrafo español a punto de la desesperación, un neonazi, un torero mexicano jubilado que vive en el desierto, una estudiante francesa lectora de Sade, una prostituta adolescente en permanente huida, un abogado gallego herido por la poesía y un editor mexicano perseguido por unos pistoleros, Los detectives salvajes es una novela donde hay de todo: amores y muertes, asesinatos y fugas, manicomios y universidades, desapariciones y apariciones.

Los detectives salvajes es la novela que lanzó a Roberto Bolaño a la fama literaria internacional antes de que 2666 estableciera su reputación para siempre. El libro ganó el Premio Herralde de Novela y el Premio Rómulo Gallegos, y fue uno de los libros del año para The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times y The New York Times Book Review.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

A National Bestseller

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 Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.

The explosive first long work by the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.

A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolaño's fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolaño's enterprise in prose; all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard--which Bolaño chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he'd written it (and even that I can't be certain of)--as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.

Voices speak from a dream, from a nightmare, from passersby, from an omniscient narrator, from Roberto Bolaño. Antwerp's fractured narration in fifty-four sections moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.

Pero a medida que la noche avanza su fiebre va remitiendo y el delirio se atenúa con la aparición de los monstruos de su pasado. Así van desfilando por el libro una serie de personajes pintados con el surrealismo típico de Bolaño: los ambiguos Oido y Odeim; un pintor guatemalteco que se deja morir de inanición en el París de 1943; Farewell, el pope de la crítica literaria chilena; María Canales, una mujer misteriosa en cuya casona de las afueras se reúne lo más granado de la literatura; y el general Pinochet, a quien Urrutia Lacroix dio clases de marxismo.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A deathbed confession revolving around Opus Dei and Pinochet, By Night in Chile pours out the self-justifying dark memories of the Jesuit priest Father Urrutia.

As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of Church and State in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel―Roberto Bolano's first work available in English―recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and a conservative literary critic, a sort of lap dog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose villas he encounters Pablo Neruda and Ernst Junger. Father Urrutia is offered a tour of Europe by agents of Opus Dei (to study the disintegration of the churches, a journey into realms of the surreal); and ensnared by this plum, he is next assigned―after the destruction of Allende―the secret, never-to-be-disclosed job of teaching Pinochet, at night, all about Marxism, so the junta generals can know their enemy. Soon, searingly, his memories go from bad to worse. Heart-stopping and hypnotic, By Night in Chile marks the American debut of an astonishing writer.

Pertenencientes a los t tulos Putas asesinas, El gaucho insufrible, Llamadas telef nicas y El secreto del mal, y escritas durante toda su vida, las piezas narrativas que componen este libro se enriquecen y adquieren un significado diferente en el di logo que establecen entre ellas.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

In the brief space of his short stories, Bola o manages to condense his entire literary universe, one of the most disruptive and personal of contemporary Spanish literature: the literature that permeates everything; sexuality; the lives of characters that despite being common, live amongst the everyday and the extraordinary; the rebellion of those who live on the narrow border that separates the system from marginality; travel as an escape but also as a way of life; the need to reveal the uncertain; youth; violence and police plots; art as an obsession, and the continued search for one's own space in a foreign place.

Belonging to the collections: Murdering Whores, The Insufferable Gaucho, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Secret of Evil, the pieces that make up this book become more enriched and acquire a different meaning as they establish a dialogue amongst them.

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three 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 and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in Fatherland, a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.

These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.