Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño's Fiction and Poetry examines the ways in which Bolaño employs a type of literary aesthetics that subverts traits traditionally associated with postmodernism. Pastén B. coins these aesthetics "postmodernism of resistance" and argues that this resistance stands in direct opposition to critical discourses that construe the presence of hopeless characters and marginal settings in Bolaño's works as signs of the writer's disillusionment with the political as a consequence of the defeat of the Left in Latin America. Rather, he contends, Bolaño creates a fictional world comprised of characters and situations that paradoxically refuse to accept defeat--even while displaying the scars of terrible historical events. In this work Pastén B. challenges some critical assumptions about Bolaño's fiction and poetry that led to decontextualized interpretations of his work and offers a singularly comprehensive investigation that synthesizes multiple perspectives of a complicated author into one text.

Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry examines the ways in which Bolaño employs a type of literary aesthetics that subverts traits traditionally associated with postmodernism. Pastén B. coins these aesthetics “postmodernism of resistance” and argues that this resistance stands in direct opposition to critical discourses that construe the presence of hopeless characters and marginal settings in Bolaño’s works as signs of the writer’s disillusionment with the political as a consequence of the defeat of the Left in Latin America. Rather, he contends, Bolaño creates a fictional world comprised of characters and situations that paradoxically refuse to accept defeat—even while displaying the scars of terrible historical events. In this work Pastén B. challenges some critical assumptions about Bolaño’s fiction and poetry that led to decontextualized interpretations of his work and offers a singularly comprehensive investigation that synthesizes multiple perspectives of a complicated author into one text.

Stories of the "failed generation" set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe.

“It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving.” —Nicole Krauss, The Guardian Oft called the “big bang” of Roberto Bolaño’s universe, Antwerp is his first novel—or the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.

Fierce and visceral, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro's poem is as canonical to Infrarealism as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was to the Beats.

Roberto Bolaño as World Literature provides an introduction to the Chilean novelist that highlights his connections with classic and contemporary masters of world literature and his investigation of topics of international interest, such as the rise of rightwing and neofascist movements during the last decades of the 20th century. But this anthology also shows how Roberto Bolaño's participation in world literature is informed in his experiences, identity, and, more generally, cultural location as a Chilean, Latin American and, more generally, Hispanic writer and man. This book provides a corrective to readings of his novels as exclusively "postmodern" or as unproblematically representative of Chilean or Latin American reality. Roberto Bolaño as World Literature thus helps readers to better understand such complex works as his monumental global five-part masterpiece 2666, his Chilean novels (Distant Star, By Night in Chile), and his Mexican narratives (Amulet, The Savage Detectives), among other works.

In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.