Showing results by author "Chris Andrews - translation" in All Categories

A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protégé in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolaño's beloved 'failed generation,' this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolaño's immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer.

A rat policeman comes to the startling realization that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he's plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolaño's best.

A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with.

Auxilio Lacouture is trapped. For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her university. A highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novella, Amulet is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl.

Dropped from the Olympic figure skating team, Nuria Martí's fate pivots her into a world of corruption, jealousy – and revenge. Cushioning her fall from grace, a besotted admirer builds a secret ice rink for her in the ruins of an old mansion on the outskirts of their seaside town. What he doesn't tell her is he paid for it using public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene.

Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo lies in hospital, 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. But on a night that 'smells of something strange', things soon go awry...

Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix is dying. A priest, a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a poet, in his feverish delirium the crucial events of his past swell around him. From glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger and his one-time student, General Pinochet, to nightmarish flashes of falcons and falconers, the Chilean landscape and faces of those now dead, reality and imagination crowd and clamber in pursuit of the 'wizened youth' who still haunts Father Lacroix all these years later.

Written immediately before Ágota Kristóf's acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.

Mass-murdering authors. Writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring. A pilot who crafts his poetry in the sky. A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of pan-American writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries. Terrifyingly witty and remarkably inventive, this is the virtuosic, one-of-a-kind masterpiece which brought Bolaño fame throughout the Spanish-speaking world.