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This title in other formats:Last Evenings on Earthby Roberto Bolano
Staff Pick
When he died in 2003, at the age of 50, Roberto Bolaño was all but unknown anywhere north of the Rio Grande, yet he is now acclaimed internationally and considered among the most eminent figures in Latin American letters. Chilean by birth, but living in exile throughout much of his life, Bolaño had always been a dedicated writer, yet began publishing with increasing fervor in the mid-1990s. Like much of his work, including the incomparable epic The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth is a bold, singular effort that defies easy classification. Many of the fourteen stories contained in Last Evenings are incisive, yet existentially enigmatic, tales of writers longing to discover the elusive answers to questions of craft and self, some of which turn out to be ambiguous at best. Often somber, even haunting, these short stories unfurl in the low-lit peripheries of prescience and immediacy that Bolaño most likely knew all too well. Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:The first story collection by Roberto Bolaño —"the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Roberto Bolaño's story collection Last Evenings on Earth was acclaimed by Francine Prose in The New York Times Book Review as "something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.... Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world." "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. His narrators are usually writers living on the margins and grappling with private (and often unlucky) quests. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin American and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved "failed generation," these stories are unimaginably gripping. One story begins: "Mauricio Silva, also known as 'The Eye,' always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us born in Latin America during the fifties and sixties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende's death." Last Evenings on Earth has been hailed as "sheer brilliance" (The San Francisco Chronicle), "vaguely, pervasively frightening" (The Nation) and "brilliant" (Kirkus Reviews). The stories, as Publishers Weekly noted, are "perfectly calibrated: Bolaño limns the capacity of a voice to carry despair without shading into bitterness." Synopsis:The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. The melancholy folklore of exile, as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano'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, Bolano 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 Bolano's beloved failed generation, the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street. His first two novels in English, By Night in Chile and Distant Star (New Directions, 2003 and 2005) were universally acclaimed. About the AuthorRoberto Bolaño was born in 1953 in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain: he wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50. Seven more of his books are forthcoming from New Directions. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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