Showing results by author "Roberto Bolano" in All Categories

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.

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.

Roberto Gómez Bolaños, “Chespirito”, fue uno de los comediantes más queridos y respetados en el mundo de habla hispana. Sus divertidos programas de televisión y personajes entrañables han marcado la niñez —y la vida— de numerosas generaciones de televidentes. Sin querer queriendo es un testimonio apasionante y lleno de añoranza de las andanzas, batallas y triunfos de un hombre que conquistó el mundo del espectáculo mediante el trabajo, la tenacidad, el extraordinario ingenio y el sentido humano.

A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.

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.

Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, fascinante y seductor poeta autodidacta habitual de los talleres literarios del Chile de Salvador Allende, y Carlos Wieder, piloto de las fuerzas aéreas chilenas que escribía versículos de la Biblia con el humo de una avioneta tras el golpe de estado de Pinochet: una y otra cara de la misma moneda, uno y el mismo oscuro personaje. Un individuo, encarnación pura del mal y la crueldad, que el narrador de esta historia, el alter ego de Bolaño y perenne detective salvaje Arturo Belano, se cuida de desmenuzar.

On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games 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 into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel.

Los cuentos de Bolaño condensan todo su universo literario, uno de los más rupturistas y personales de la creación en español: la literatura, la sexualidad, lo cotidiano y lo extraordinario, la rebeldía de los que viven en el límite de la marginalidad, el viaje como huida y como forma de vida, la juventud, la violencia, las tramas policiales y el arte como obsesión.

Sacerdote derechista, reconocido crítico literario, ignorado poeta, Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix se encuentra tendido en la cama una noche que parece ser su última en este mundo. El sudor, el delirio, la certeza de un final y su dolencia lo aquejan cruelmente.

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 Benno von Archimboldi, cuya vida se refiere en la parte final de la novela.

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. 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 Bolaño'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 conservative literary critic, a sort of lapdog to the rich and powerful cultural elite.

Dos jóvenes poetas latinoamericanos, Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima, emprenden una aventura que transcurrirá durante varias décadas y cruzará distintos países. Símbolo de la rebeldía y la necesidad de ruptura con la realidad establecida, sus vidas representan los anhelos de toda una generación. La búsqueda en 1975 de la misteriosa escritora mexicana Cesárea Tinajero, desaparecida y olvidada en los años posteriores a la revolución, sirve de inicio a un viaje sin descanso marcado por el amor, la muerte, el deseo de libertad, el humor y la literatura.

“Extraordinary . . . [Bolaño’s] greatest work.” —James Wood, The New York Times Book Review “A marvelous river of feeling, a brilliant meditation, an enthralling fantasy—By Night in Chile is the real thing, and the rarest: a contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in...

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 humor 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 twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Terrifyingly witty and remarkably inventive, Nazi Literature in the Americas is the virtuosic, one-of-a-kind masterpiece that brought Bolaño fame throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

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.

Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño is a forthcoming title from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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 Echevarra 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.'"

“The greatest writer to have appeared in Latin America since the so-called ‘boom’ . . . I’m tempted to call Bolaño the love child of David Lynch and Jorge Luis Borges—he’s that visceral and erudite—but this wouldn’t do justice to his ambition.” —John Powers, NPR’s Fresh...

A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. 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, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.

New Year’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.