Roberto Bolaño has attained an almost mythical stature and is often considered the most influential Latin American writer of his generation. The first English-language volume of essays on the Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, includes ten critical essays of his oeuvre. With a special emphasis on his masterpieces: 2666, The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, and Distant Star, the essays address topics such as Borges's influence and the role of repetition, social memory, allegory, and neoliberalism.

Roberto Bolaño has attained an almost mythical stature and is often considered the most influential Latin American writer of his generation. The first English-language volume of essays on the Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, includes ten critical essays of his oeuvre. With a special emphasis on his masterpieces: 2666, The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, and Distant Star, the essays address topics such as Borges's influence and the role of repetition, social memory, allegory, and neoliberalism.

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."

A deluxe edition of Bolano’s complete poetry Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolano touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which “you become infinitely small without disappearing.” When asked, “What makes you believe you’re a better poet than a novelist?” Bolano replied, “The poetry makes me blush less.” The sum of his life’s work in his preferred medium, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolano’s gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. “Poetry,” he believed, “is braver than anyone.”

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

On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town. Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo's well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo's favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game's consequences may be all too real. Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own—and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Roberto Bolaño has attained an almost mythical stature and is often considered the most influential Latin American writer of his generation. The first English-language volume of essays on the Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, includes ten critical essays of his oeuvre. With a special emphasis on his masterpieces: 2666, The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, and Distant Star, the essays address topics such as Borges's influence and the role of repetition, social memory, allegory, and neoliberalism.