From Barnes & Noble
Roberto Bolaño is one of the most respected writers in the Latin American generation that came of age in the 1970s. These short stories, his first collection in English translation, follows the landscape of exile, repression, and dispossession that was the fate of Bolaño and so many of his contemporaries. The subjects can be grim, but the stories are suffused with a mordant wit and incomparable irony that is so often the mark of a resistance forever defeated and forever renewed. These are stories about literature and for literature.
From the Publisher
The acclaimed Chilean author’s first collection of stories to be published in English. Here are fourteen stories set largely among those living in the margins, on the edge.
“The most haunting and mesmerizing collection I have ever read.”—Daily Telegraph
The New York Times -
Francine Prose
Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world.
Publishers Weekly
Chilean Bolano (1953-2003) wrote 10 novels (including Distant Star, published to acclaim last year), books of poems and two story collections before this one. These 14 bleakly luminous stories are all told in the first person by men (usually young) who yearn for something just out of their grasp (fame, talent, love) and who harbor few hopes of attaining what they desire. New Yorker readers may remember two selections: "G mez Palacio," concerning the grimly uneventful encounter of a Mexico City writer with the woman who directs the backwater writing program where he comes to teach, and the title story, set in 1975, in which a young Mexico City man and his father vacation in Acapulco-a trip their relationship is not strong enough to survive. The stories are similar, in theme and voice (though not in locale), and they are perfectly calibrated: Bola o limns the capacity of a voice to carry despair without shading into bitterness. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Forest Turner
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Library Journal
Bolaño (1953-2003), a Chilean poet and novelist, fled his homeland during Pinochet's coup and spent the rest of his life in Mexico, France, and Spain. As his work appears in English, his stature grows; this year has already marked the arrival of his novel The Savage Detectives(LJ1/07), hailed as a masterpiece in the Spanish-speaking world. This collection contains 14 short stories selected from two volumes, Llamadas telefónicas(1997) and Putas asesinas(2001). Many of the stories feature protagonists with names derived from the author's (Arturo Belano or simply "B") who publish minor works of literature, teach writing workshops, and drift through relationships and locales. Bolaño is playful and humorous when he touches on the absurdities of everyday life, but the stories have a dark undercurrent; nearly all are colored by the theme of exile and its often tragic aftermath. While his plots are skimpy and he doesn't display much range, Bolaño's writing is insidious and may prove to be highly influential. Recommended for larger fiction collections.
Kirkus Reviews
Exile, alienation and a fatalistic sense of the impermanence of human connections and relations dominate this collection of 14 stories written by the late (1953-2003), brilliant Chilean author. Bola-o (who sometimes appears in the stories, identified as "B.") was a leftist intellectual haunted by lingering fallout from his country's political catastrophes (notably, a 1973 military coup), including destroyed marriages and families, betrayed ideals and unrealized dreams. His stories-which echo the allegorical terseness of his recently translated novels By Night in Chile (2003) and Distant Star (2004)-phlegmatically record such unconsummated or indistinct experiences as an unnamed writer's friendship through correspondence with an older writer whose burden of hardships is too complex to be shared ("Sensini"); a failed poet's compensation for his artistic ineptness in an imaginative escape from reality ("Enrique Martin"); a Chilean exile's gradually revelatory encounter with a countryman unmanned and enervated by the annihilation of his hopes for a more just society ("Days of 1978"); and a minor writer's small triumph when he acts as "secretary, messenger, or valet" to more accomplished contemporaries during the perilous days of the French Resistance ("Henri Simon Leprince"). A few stories ("Phone Calls," "Anne Moore's Life") misfire or fail to play to Bola-o's strengths (the uncharacteristically comic "Gomez Palacio," the fragmentary autobiographical piece "Dance Card"). But at his best, he echoes the elliptical precision of Borges, Kafka, Mexican surrealist Juan Rulfo and the great prestidigitator Julio Cortazar-notably, in the superb title story, which portrays a young intellectual'sAcapulco vacation with his father as a slowly dawning apprehension of approaching death; and the subtly exfoliating "Dentist," in which exchanges of stories and a vision of how they're made confirms for its narrator (what he has already intuited) that "We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain." Read Bolano, and you'll understand what he means.
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