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Nazi Literature in the Americas

by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.

"It's the sort of clever idea an author like Borges might sketch out in the short space of one of his stories -- but what's so remarkable is that Bolano takes the idea and sees it through... Nazi Literature in the Americas is an astonishing work." -- The Complete Review

Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolaño'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 Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, 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).

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Cloth edition also available

Last Evenings on Earth

by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

Now in paperback, the first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño.Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.

"The stories are similar, in theme and voice (though not in locale), and they are perfectly calibrated: Bolaño limns the capacity of a voice to carry despair without shading into bitterness."
- Publishers Weekly

"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolaño'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," Bolaño 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 Bolaño's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.

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Amulet

by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

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.

"The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world."
- Susan Sontag, The London Times Literary Supplement

"Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own."
- Francisco Goldman, The New York Times Magazine

"By far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time."
- Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times

Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño'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 cafés 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 (Bolaño'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."

Distant Star

by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.

"Bolaño's reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent."
- Larry Rohter, The New York Times

"Few artists will invite you in, offer a seat, and then so gracefully pull the chair out from under you."
- Andrew Ervin, The Journal News

The star of Roberto Bolaño'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 multi-media 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 Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño'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 New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño."

"A true masterpiece that will remain one of the key readings of contemporary literature."
- Juan A. Masoliver Ródenas, Vanguardia

"Bolaño's prose marries humor and irony, violence and love, poetry and death."
- Aura Estrada, Bookforum

"Bolaño's spare prose lends his narrator's account a chilly precision."
- The New Yorker

"Subtle and terrifying...a twisted, compressed masterpiece."
- Anderson Tepper, The New York Times Book Review

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By Night in Chile

by Roberto Bolaño; translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews

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.

"A contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in world literature."
- Susan Sontag, The Manchester Guardian

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 Bolaño'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 Jünger. 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.

"Bolaño [is] the brightest literary star in the current Latin American panorama."
- El Pais

"A true masterpiece."
- Vanguardia

"Mordant, haunting and sometimes elegaic...takes the reader hurtling into the darkest psychological folds of one man and one country."
- Marc Cooper, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Haunting and mordant ... written with unsettling art ... the most damning sentence ... has the pallor and stillness of a shroud."
- Richard Eder, The New York Times

"Postwar Chilean politics and literature infuse this densely learned, richly evocative novel....reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald."
- Mark Kamine, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the great Latin American novels, in an exemplary translation. Not to be missed."
- Kirkus Reviews