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.

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.

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."

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.

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. It is September 1968 and the Mexican student movement is about to run head-on into the repressive right-wing government of Mexico: hundreds of young people will soon die. When the army invades the university, one woman hides in a fourth-floor ladies' room and for twelve days she is the only person left on campus. Staring at the floor, she recounts her bohemian life among the young poets of Mexico City-- inventing and reinventing freely-- and along the way she creates a cosmology of literature. She is Auxilio Lacouture, the Mother of Mexican Poetry. Auxilio speaks of her passionate attachment to young poets as well as to two beloved aged poets, to a woman who once slept with Che Guevera, and to the painter Remedios Varo, recalling visits which never occured. And as they grow ever more hallucinatory, her memories become mythologies before completely transforming into riveting dark prophecies. Hair-raising and enthralling, Amuletis a heart-breaking novel and another brilliant example of the art of Roberto Bolan o, the most admired novelist, as Susan Sontag noted, in the Spanish-speaking world.

"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.

Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolano's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. Nazi Literature in the Americas is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. Ernesto Perez Mason, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Origenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with Jose Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Mea Cuba. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).

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.

Featuring several mass-murdering authors, two fraternal writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring and a poet who crafts his lines in the air with sky writing, Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas details the lives of a rich cast of characters from one of the most extraordinary imaginations in world literature. Written with sharp wit and virtuosic flair, this encyclopaedic group of fictional pan-American authors is the terrifyingly humorous and remarkably inventive masterpiece which made Bolano famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

One more journey to the literary universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature

Roberto Bolaño’s boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into enduring fiction is unmistakable in these three exhilarating 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.

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a master of contemporary fiction. These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño’s extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his great triumphs, while deepening our understanding of his profound gifts.

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.

Between Parentheses collects Roberto Bolano s nonfiction: fiercely opinionated articles, speeches, essays, and talks, as well as most of the newspaper columns he wrote during the last five years of his life, when fame had come to him at last. Here we have a tender account of his return to Chile, reflections on family life, impassioned takes on books by writers Bolano admired (or vehemently despised), and advice on how to write a short story. Between Parentheses fully lives up to Bolano s own demands: I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity on all levels. "

The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories that seem to tell what Bolano called "the secret story," "the one we'll never know." Bent on returning to haunt you, Bolano's tales might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, or soccer, witchcraft, or a dream of meeting the poet Enrique Lihn:they always surprise. Consider the title story: a young partygoer collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor. Just as his soul is departing his body,it realizes strange happenings are afoot around his now dead body - and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolano's own).

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."

Udo Berger, escritor fracasado y campeon de juegos de estrategia, viaja de nuevo al pequeno pueblo de la Costa Brava catalana donde pasaba los veranos de su infancia. Acompanado por su novia, pasa la mayor parte del tiempo con su juego favorito: El Tercer Reich. Una noche conocen a otra pareja de alemanes, Charly y Hanna, con quien planean pasar los siguientes dias. Pero cuando Charly desaparece esa misma noche, la apacible vida de Udo cambiara bruscamente.
Escrita en 1989 y encontrada entre sus archivos tras su muerte, "El Tercer Reich" es puro Bolano --detectives, personajes extravagantes, y un descenso a los infiernos. En su lenguaje, en sus formas y en sus temas podemos ver el germen de futuras obras maestras tales como "Los detectives salvajes" o "2666."

Udo Berger, a failed writer and strategy wargames champion travels to the small resort in Spain's Costa Brava where he spent his childhood summers to train for an international tournament. Accompanied by his new girlfriend, they befriend another German couple with whom they spend most of their time. But when one of his friends disappears after a night out with two local sinister characters, Udo's serene life will be disrupted as he is pursued by a private detective.
"El Tercer Reich" is pure Bolano--a detective, extravagant characters, and a descent into madness--and in it we can be seen the seed of future masterpieces such as "Los detectives salvajes" ("The Savage Detectives") or "2666." Thought to have been written in the early 1990s, "El Tercer Reich" was found among Bolano's papers after his death.