Roberto Bolaño Books In Order

Novels

  1. By Night in Chile (2003)
  2. Distant Star (2004)
  3. Amulet (2007)
  4. The Savage Detectives (2007)
  5. Na*zi Literature in the Americas (2008)
  6. 2666 (2008)
  7. The Skating Rink (2009)
  8. Monsieur Pain (2010)
  9. Antwerp (2010)
  10. The Third Reich (2011)
  11. Woes of the True Policeman (2012)
  12. A Little Lumpen Novelita (2014)
  13. The Spirit of Science Fiction (2019)

Collections

  1. Last Evenings on Earth (2006)
  2. The Return (2010)
  3. The Insufferable Gaucho (2010)
  4. The Secret of Evil (2014)
  5. Cowboy Graves (2021)

Non fiction

  1. Bolano: The Last Interview (2009)
  2. Between Parentheses (2011)

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Roberto Bolaño Books Overview

By Night in Chile

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 Bola o’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 J nger. 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.

Distant Star

A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bola o’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. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bola o’s darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bola o’s world there’s a big graveyard and there’s a big graveyard laugh. He once described his novel By Night in Chile as ‘a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral gothic novel.’ Many Chilean authors have written about the ‘bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders,’ Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: ‘None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bola o.’

Amulet

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 Bola o’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 caf’s and bars of the University. She’s tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano Bola o’s fictional stand in throughout his books. As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the ’70s, and the last words of the novel are: ‘And that song is our Amulet.’

The Savage Detectives

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 Ces rea 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 Bola o 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.

Na*zi Literature in the Americas

A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini encyclopedia of nonexistent Na*zi literature in our hemisphere by Roberto Bola o: ‘his generation’s premier Latin American writer’ The New York Times.
A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Na*zi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

Composed of short biographies about imaginary writers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the USA, Na*zi Literature in the Americas includes descriptions of the writers’ works, cross references, a bibliography, and also an epilogue ‘For Monsters’. All the writers are carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. There are fourteen thematic sections with titles such as ‘Forerunners and Figures of the Anti Enlightenment,’ ‘Magicians, Mercenaries and Miserable Individuals,’ and ‘North American Poets.’

Brisk and pseudo academic, Na*zi Literature in the Americas delicately balances irony and pathos. Bola o does not simply use his writers for target practice: in the space of a few pages he manages to sketch character portraits that are often pathetically funny, sometimes surprisingly moving, and, on occasion, authentically chilling. A remarkably inventive, funny, and disquieting sui generis novel, Na*zi Literature in the Americas offers a clear view into the workings of one of the most extraordinarily fecund literary imaginations of our time.
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2666

Santa Teresa, on the Mexico US border, is an urban sprawl that draws in lost souls. Among them are three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; and a police detective in love with an elusive older woman. But there is darker side still to the town. It is an emblem of corruption, violence and decadence, and one from which, over the course of a decade, hundreds of women have mysteriously, often brutally, disappeared. Told in five parts, ‘2666’ is the epic novel that defines one of Latin America’s greatest writers and his unique vision of the modern world. Conceived on an astonishing scale, and in the last years of Roberto Bolano’s life with burning, visionary commitment, it has been greeted across Europe and Latin America as his masterpiece, surpassing even his previous work in inventiveness, imagination, beauty and scope. ‘A tour de force though the phrase seems hardly adequate to describe the novel’s narrative velocity, polyphonic range, inventiveness, and bravery’ ‘New York Review of Books’. ‘One of the giants of the post Marquez era’ ‘Sunday Telegraph’. ‘One of the greatest and most influential modern writers’ James Wood.

The Skating Rink

He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time. Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles TimesSet in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Mart . When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and The Skating Rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well. A complex book, The Skating Rink‘s short chapters are skillfully broken off with questions to maintain the narrative tension: Who was murdered? Who was the murderer? Will the murderer be caught? All of these questions are answered, and yet The Skating Rink is not fundamentally a crime novel, or not exclusively; it s also about political corruption, sex, the experience of immigration, and frustrated passion. And it s an atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in a seaside town, with its vacationers, its drifters, its businessmen, bureaucrats and social workers.

Monsieur Pain

A story of hopeless love, desperate grief and the power of guilt: ‘Monsieur Pain‘ is a hallucinatory masterwork by the great Roberto Bolano. Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies dying in hospital. He’s hiccupping himself to death. When the doctors struggle to offer a diagnosis his wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud, the mesmerist and reclusive bachelor Pierre Pain. Pain, in love with the widow Reynaud and eager to impress, agrees to help. But on a night that ‘smells of something strange’, things soon go awry…
After the appearance of two mysterious Spaniards, Monsieur Pain finds his access to the hospital barred; Madame Reynaud leaves Paris and he is left alone. Ravaged by guilt and anxiety, he wanders the rainy, crepuscular streets. Then he encounters fellow mesmerist Plomeur Boudou who’s working as a torturer for Franco, using his expertise to interrogate prisoners and things become darker still. This brief, wonderfully oneiric novel blends the finest of Edgar Allan Poe with Jorge Luis Borges and, through Bolano’s truly astonishing alchemical gift, produces a gripping noir conspiracy as rich as it is strange.

Antwerp

Antwerp‘s signature elements crimes and campgrounds, drifters and poetry, sex and love, corrupt cops and misfits mark this, his first novel, as pure Bola o. A elegantly produced, small collectible stamped cover on cloth edition. As Bola o s friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarr a, once suggested, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bola o s fictional universe. Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bola o s enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard which Bola o 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 Bola o all speak moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.

The Third Reich

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. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo s favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game s consequences may be all too real. Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bola o s papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world class writer coming into his own and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Last Evenings on Earth

The first short story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bola o. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.’The melancholy folklore of exile,’ as Roberto Bola o 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,’ Bola o 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 Bola o’s beloved ‘failed generation,’ the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.

The Return

Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bola o. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: a trove of strangely arresting, short master works. As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bola o’s short stories is that they can do the work of a novel. The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bola o story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex girlfriend or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot and what follows next defies the imagination except Bola o s own. Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bola o s many readers will be like catnip to the cats. .

The Insufferable Gaucho

A trove of strange, arresting, short masterworks five stories and two essays by Roberto Bola o, a writer who pulls bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat. As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bola o’s short stories is that they can do the work of a novel. The Insufferable Gaucho contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bola o story might concern an elusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bola o s stories have been applauded as bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated Publishers Weekly and complex and provocative International Herald Tribune, and as Francine Prose said in The New York Times Book Review, something extraordinarily beautiful and at least to me entirely new. Two fascinating essays are also included.

The Secret of Evil

A collection that gathers everything Bola o was working on before his untimely death.A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo familiar to readers of Na*zi Literature in the Americas and 2666 recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The As*shole of Morelos. Belano s son Ger nimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory…
The various pieces in the posthumous Secret of Evil extend the intricate, single web that is the work of Roberto Bola o.

Bolano: The Last Interview

With the release of Roberto Bola o’s The Savage Detectives in 1998,journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer capable of befriending his readers. After exchanging several letters with Bola o, Maristain formed a friendship of her own, culminating in an extensive interview with the novelist about truth and consequences, an interview that turned out to be Bola o s last. Appearing for the first time in English, Bola o s final interview is accompanied by a collection of conversations with reporters stationed throughout Latin America, providing a rich context for the work of the writer who, according to essayist Marcela Valdes, is a T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American letters. As in all of Bola o s work, there is also wide ranging discussion of the author s many literary influences. Explanatory notes on authors and titles that may be unfamiliar to English language readers are included here. The interviews, all of which were completed during the writing of the gigantic 2666, also address Bola o s deepest personal concerns, from his domestic life and two young children to the realities of a fatal disease.

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