One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolano, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolano'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--Bolano'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 Bolano's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.

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 Bolano 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. Bolano has joined the immortals."

In this dazzling novel, the book that established Robert Bolano's international reputation, he tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through their darkening, entropic world.

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. 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.

Remo Erdosain's Buenos Aires is a dim, seething, paranoid hive of hustlers and whores, scoundrels and madmen, and Erdosain feels his soul is as polluted as anything in this dingy city. Possessed by the directionlessness of the society around him, trapped between spiritual anguish and madness, he clings to anything that can give his life meaning: small-time defrauding of his employers, hatred of his wife's cousin Gregorio Barsut, a part in the Astrologer's plans for a new world order... but is that enough? Or is the only appropriate response to reality - insanity? Written in 1929, The Seven Madmen depicts an Argentina on the edge of the precipice. This teeming world of dreamers, revolutionaries and scheming generals was Arlt's uncanny prophesy of the cycle of conflict which would scar his country's passage through the twentieth century, and even today it retains its power as one of the great apocalyptic works of modern literature.

"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid. In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolano writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died." Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.

Uno de los 10 libros del ano del
"New York Times Book Review"
Cuatro academicos tras la pista de un enigmatico escritor aleman; un periodista de Nueva York en su primer trabajo en Mexico; un filosofo viudo; un detective de policia enamorado de una esquiva mujer --estos son algunos de los personajes arrastrados hasta la ciudad fronteriza de Santa Teresa, donde en la ultima decada han desaparecido cientos de mujeres.
Publicada postumamente, la ultima novela de Roberto Bolano no solo 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 epoca para formar parte de la literatura universal.

As Bolano's friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano's fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard-which Bolano 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. Antwerp's fractured narration in 54 sections-voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from "Roberto Bolano" all speak-moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.

Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, suffering from a fever and fearing that he is dying, recalls the most important events in his life, from Paris in 1943 to Chile under General Pinochet.

Originally published: Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, c1996.

Author of "The Savage Detectives" and "2666"
Crushed by a devastating scandal, university professor Oscar Amalfitano flees Barcelona for Santa Teresa--a Mexican city close to the U.S. border, where women are being killed in staggering numbers. There, Amalfitano begins an affair with Castillo, a young forger of Larry Rivers paintings, while his daughter, Rosa, reeling from the weight of his secrets, seeks solace in a romance of her own. Yet when she finds her father in bed with Castillo, Rosa is confronted with the full force of her crisis.
What follows is an intimate police investigation of Amalfitano, leading to a finale of euphoria and heartbreak. Featuring characters and stories from "The Savage Detectives" and "2666," Roberto Bolano's "Woes of the True Policeman" mines the depths of art, memory, and desire--and marks the culmination of one of the great careers of world literature.

A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice

On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war-game champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent his summers as a child. There, they meet another vacationing German couple, who introduce them to the darker side of the resort town's life. Soon Udo is enmeshed in a round of the Third Reich, his favorite World War II strategy game, with a shadowy local called El Quemado. As the game draws to its conclusion, Udo discovers that the outcome may be all too real.

Written in 1989, "The Third Reich" is a stunning exploration of memory and violence---and a rare glimpse at a world-class writer coming into his own.

"Una obra maestra." --"The New Yorker"
Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima, dos quijotes modernos, salen tras las huellas de Cesarea Tinajero, la misteriosa escritora desaparecida en Mexico en los anos posteriores a la revolucion. Esa busqueda --el viaje y sus consecuencias-- se prolonga durante veinte anos, bifurcandose a traves de numerosos personajes y continentes, Con escenarios como Mexico, Nicaragua, Estados Unidos, Francia y Espana, y personajes entre los que destacan un fotografo espanol a punto de la desesperacion, 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 poesia 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 lanzo a Roberto Bolano a la fama literaria internacional antes de que "2666" estableciera su reputacion para siempre. El libro gano el Premio Herralde de Novela y el Premio Romulo Gallegos, y fue uno de los libros del ano para "The Washington Post, ""Los Angeles Times" y "The New York Times Book Review."