Roberto Bolaño's Fiction

Roberto Bolaño's Fiction PDF Author: Chris Andrews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolaño's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction. Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolaño's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolaño's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolaño's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolaño emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.

Roberto Bolaño's Fiction

Roberto Bolaño's Fiction PDF Author: Chris Andrews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolaño's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction. Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolaño's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolaño's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolaño's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolaño emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.

The Savage Detectives Reread

The Savage Detectives Reread PDF Author: David Kurnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550650
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
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.

The Spirit of Science Fiction

The Spirit of Science Fiction PDF Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1529924529
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City. Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world. But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions. Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city’s labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER ‘Fascinating... Achingly beautiful... It reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave’ New Yorker ‘The Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño’s fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy’ Paris Review

Queer Exposures

Queer Exposures PDF Author: Ryan Long
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988143
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) stands out among recent Latin American writers because of his unique combination of critical acclaim, popularity, and literary significance. Queer Exposures analyzes two central but understudied topics in Bolaño’s fiction and poetry: sexuality and photography. Moving beyond a consideration of how his texts represent these topics, Ryan F. Long demonstrates that, when considered in tandem, they form the basis for a new innovative and critical approach. Emphasizing the processes of exposure associated with photography and sexuality, especially queer sexuality, provides readers and scholars with a versatile method for comprehending Bolaño’s constellation of texts. With close readings of a broad range of texts, from poetry written just after his arrival in Spain in the late 1970s to his posthumously published novels, Queer Exposures concludes that an emphasis on sexuality and photography is essential for understanding how Bolaño’s texts function in dialogue with one another to elucidate and critique the interrelations of writing, visual representation, and power.

2666

2666 PDF Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1053

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Book Description
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Last Evenings on Earth

Last Evenings on Earth PDF Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811216883
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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

By Night in Chile

By Night in Chile PDF Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811215474
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
"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.

Distant Star

Distant Star PDF Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811220524
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano'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 Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano'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 Bolano."

The Return

The Return PDF Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 9780330510615
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
One of the remarkable qualities of Bolaño's short stories is that they seem to tell what Bolaño called 'the secret story', 'the one we'll never know'. The Return contains thirteen unforgettable tales bent on returning to haunt you, most of them appearing in English for the first time here. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolaño story is just as likely to concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, the history of a porn star or two embittered police detectives debating their favourite weapons: 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 Bolaño's own, of course).

The Unknown University

The Unknown University PDF Author: Roberto Bolaño
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811219283
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 839

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Book Description
Collects the poetic works of the Chilean author, including works of prose poetry, fiction in verse, and pieces that defy categorization.