From his first fifteen years in Chile, to his nine years in Mexico City from 1968 to 1977, to the quarter of a century he lived and worked in the Blanes-Barcelona area on the Costa Brava in Spain through his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño developed into an astonishingly diverse, prolific writer. He is one of the most consequential and widely read of his generation in any language. Increasingly recognized not only in Latin America, but as a major figure in World Literature, Bolaño is an essential writer for the 21st century world. This volume provides a comprehensive mapping of the pivotal contexts, events, stages, and influences shaping Bolaño's writing. As the wide-ranging investigations of this volume's 28 distinguished scholars show, Bolaño's influence and impact will shape literary cultures worldwide for years to come.

From his first fifteen years in Chile, to his nine years in Mexico City from 1968 to 1977, to the quarter of a century he lived and worked in the Blanes-Barcelona area on the Costa Brava in Spain through his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño developed into an astonishingly diverse, prolific writer. He is one of the most consequential and widely read of his generation in any language. Increasingly recognized not only in Latin America, but as a major figure in World Literature, Bolaño is an essential writer for the 21st century world. This volume provides a comprehensive mapping of the pivotal contexts, events, stages, and influences shaping Bolaño's writing. As the wide-ranging investigations of this volume's 30 distinguished scholars show, Bolaño's influence and impact will shape literary cultures worldwide for years to come.

The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.

This is one of the first books to trace the development of Roberto Bolaño's work from the beginning to the end of his career. It will appeal to graduates and researchers working on Bolaño and Latin American Literature generally, particularly the novel, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.

"During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying, and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Among them are the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German novelist Ernst Junger, and General Augusto Pinochet - whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine - as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched his own."--Jacket.

When Oscar Amalfitano begins an affair with one of his students, he has no idea where it will lead. More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change him for ever. Forced to flee Barcelona with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amalfitano finds himself in Santa Teresa, a sprawling, mythical town on the Mexico-US border, populated by mysterious characters and haunted by dark tales of murdered women. Returning to the the world and characters of 2666, Bolaño's masterpiece, Woes of the True Policeman explores the the power of art, memory and desire - and marks a kaleidoscopic, lyrical and darkly humorous last act in one of the great oeuvres of world literature. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER ‘Hallucinatory, manic, fearful, comic... Bolaño must be read by anyone who loves the novel’ Herald ‘We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius’ Patti Smith

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