Overview

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolano's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. 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 Bolano's fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy' Paris Review

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9781784879549

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Reviews

[This] gem-choked puzzle of a book . . . serves as a key to Bolaño’s later work, unlocking clues to his abiding obsessions . . . [and] is a hardy forerunner that stands on its own. * New York Times * The novel is dappled with recognizably Bolañan pleasures * Paris Review * The novel’s sunny sense of what it is like to be a young man falling in love – with words and ideas as well as with women – is irresistible. * Telegraph * [A]n entertaining, lyrical and accomplished novel. * Wall Street Journal * [A] gem . . . Bolaño’s lusty, laughing passion for art and literature, for women and Mexico City, is tangible here. * Washington Post *

A gem-choked puzzle of a book * New York Times * The novel is dappled with recognizably Bolañan pleasures * Paris Review * Irresistible. * Telegraph * [A]n entertaining, lyrical and accomplished novel. * Wall Street Journal * Bolaño is the writer who opened a new vein for 21st Century literature... Vivacious and weird and madly alive again.

Author Information

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.

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