Roberto Bolaño

Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border: an urban sprawl that draws lost souls to it like a vortex.Convicts and academics find themselves here, as does an American sportswriter, a teenage student with her widowed father, and a reclusive, 'missing' author. But, there is a darker side to the town. Girls and women are disappearing at an alarming rate.As a sense of conspiracy grows and an apocalyptic shadow draws closer, the corruption, violence and decadence of twentieth-century history reveals itself in a novel of an astonishing scale and burning intensity.TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMERA landmark in whats possible for the novel. Bolaño has proven it can do anything New York TimesWondrous... Unforgettable...will resonate for years to come Daily TelegraphAs riveting as any top-notch thriller... 2666 achieves something extremely rare in fiction: it provides an all-encompassing view of our world Sunday Times

A vast literary reckoning with disappearance, obsession and the violence threaded through modern history.Set in Santa Teresa on the Mexico US border, this literary crime novel about missing women unfolds across intersecting lives: European academics in pursuit of a reclusive writer, a journalist drawn into the citys unrest, and a community haunted by a growing list of unsolved murders.What begins as an intellectual quest gradually reveals a deeper and more disturbing pattern. The killings of girls and women recur with numbing regularity, their investigation fragmented and inconclusive. Around them, careers advance, rivalries flare and history presses forward. The search for meaning becomes inseparable from the search for the dead.Shifting between continents and decades, the novel resists easy answers. Its scope is immense, yet its power lies in accumulation: detail by detail, case by case, it exposes the quiet machinery that allows brutality to persist.

An unnamed narrator attempts to piece together the life and works of an enigmatic would-be poet turned military assassin during Pinochet's regime in Chile. In the early 1970s Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was a little-known poet living in southern Chile. After the military coup of 1973 that brought in the dictatorship of General Pinochet, he embarked upon a new career that involved him in committing murder and other brutalities, and subsequently led to his emergence as a lieutenant in the Chilean air force under his actual name, Carlos Wieder. Some time later the narrator, now held in a prison camp, looks up and sees a World War II airplane writing the first words of the Book of Genesis in smoke in the sky. The aviator is none other Carlos Wieder, launching his own version of the New Chilean Poetry.

enlarge image save image print page add this Auxilio Lacouture is trapped. For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of the university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale: she is the Mother of Mexican poetry. This highly charged first-person semi-hallucinatory novel is a potent stream of consciousness through which the poets of Mexico rage and swirl. Filled with wild, dark literary prophecies, heroic poets, mad poets, artists choked by the brilliance of youth, Auxilio's passionate narration both heart-breaking and lyrical is suffused with the essence of Bolaño's art.

Ahora soy madre y una mujer casada, pero no hace mucho tiempo que llevaba una vida de crimen ": así comienza Bianca su relato sobre crecer de la manera difícil en la dura Roma en A Little Lumpen Nove

With "2666," Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the 20th-century novel . . . who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand . . . summation of their culture.--"The Washington Post."

During the course of a single night, Fatherr 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. Thus we are given glimpses of the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German writer Ernst Junger, General 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 upon his.

Alberto Ruiz-Tagle was once the quiet, unknowable, unpromising member of Chiles young poetry scene. But the military coup of 1973 sees Alberto reborn as Chiles leading celebrity poet, Carlos Wieder. Known for his daring sky poems, penned in smoke high above the cities, Weiders dazzling trajectory is a cause for astonishment and speculation amongst his old poetry friends. Where did this talent suddenly spring from? And, how is it connected to the disappearance of the beautiful Garmendia twins? Told from across the years in exile in Europe, the narrators attempts to trace the fate of his old circle will lead him to one last confrontation with the brutality of their generation. Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

This is a highly charged novel that embodies the violent recent history of Latin America. It is September 1968 and the Mexican student movement is about to run head-on into the repressive right-wing government of Mexico: hundreds of young people will soon die. When the army invades the university, one woman hides in a fourth-floor ladies'' room and for twelve days she is the only person left on campus. Staring at the floor, she recounts her bohemian life among the young poets of Mexico City - inventing and reinventing freely - and along the way she creates a cosmology of literature. As they grow ever more hallucinatory, her ''memories'' become mythologies before completely transforming into riveting dark prophecies. Hair-raising and enthralling, Amulet is a heart-breaking novel and another brilliant example of the art of Roberto Bolano, ''the most admired novelist,'' as Susan Sontag noted, ''in the Spanish-speaking world.''

When Nuria Mart??, the beautiful Spanish figure skater, is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, 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 that he paid for it using embezzled public funds. Such deceit is not without repercussions, and the skating rink soon becomes a crime scene . . . Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, The Skating Rink narrated in turn by a corrupt and pompous civil servant, a beleaguered romantic poet, and a duplicitous local entrepreneur is a darkly atmospheric tale of murder and its motives.

Shortly after becoming the German war-games champion, Udo Berger and his girlfriend, Ingeborg, take a holiday on the Costa Brava. There they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals including the Wolf and the Lamb who introduce them to the darker side of life in the town. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo''s well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval... Refusing to leave the resort, even after Ingeborg returns home, Udo''s increasingly feverish dreams push him into delirium. As everything slips beyond his grasp, he attempts to re-assert himself by engaging the enigmatic and severely disfigured El Quemado a foreigner who lives in a Spartan burrow on the beach in a days-long match of his favourite war game, Third Reich. But, too late to stop the madness, he realises that the consequences of this game are more serious than he ever imagined.

This bilingual collection of forty-four poems presents English readers with their first chance to encounter the phenomenon of Roberto Bolano as a poet: his own preferred and strongest literary persona. (When asked, 'What makes you believe that you're a better poet than a novelist?' Bolano replied, 'The poetry makes me blush less.') These poems intimate, moving, witty and wide-ranging are as diverse in form as his fiction and will offer the reader equal delight. Expertly translated from the original Spanish by Laura Healy, this is as an opportunity to encounter a poetic voice like no other; a voice hailed by Susan Sontag as 'the real thing and the rarest'. 'They radiate the audacity of intellect, as well as the cruelty of vision, that have won their author a devoted following

First published in Spanish in 1998, The Savage Detectives was immediately hailed as a critical success, wining the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize. But with the 2007 English-language translation the book became more than a bestseller -- it began the global sensation of Bolanomania. New Year's Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, this remarkable quest is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century. In 2012 Picador celebrates its 40th anniversary. During that time we have published many prize-winning and bestselling authors including Bret Easton Ellis and Cormac McCarthy, Alice Sebold and Helen Fielding, Graham Swift and Alan Hollinghurst. Years later, Picador continue to bring readers the very best contemporary fiction, non-fiction and poetry from across the globe. Discover more at picador.com/40

With a new afterword by Natasha Wimmer 'Savagely comic yet equally tender ...This novel is an elegy for a generation' Independent New Year's Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe -- our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century. 'The comic frenzy, the inventiveness of character and situation, and the mood-soaked depiction of 1970s Mexico is delightful' Times Literary Supplement 'A portrait of people for whom literature is bread and water, sex and death. The abiding message to be taken from Bolano's novel, and maybe from his fraught life, too: books matter' GQ 'It's no exaggeration to call Bolano a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality' Washington Post 'Bolano makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' Guardian

From a master of contemporary fiction, a tale of bohemian youth on the make in Mexico CityTwo 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--or sacrifice themselves to it. Roberto Bolaño's The Spirit of Science Fiction is a story of youth hungry for revolution, notoriety, and sexual adventure, as they work to construct a reality out of the fragments of their dreams.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 and dreams of cosmonauts and Nazis. Meanwhile, Remo runs headfirst 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.This kaleidoscopic work of strange and tender beauty is a fitting introduction for readers uninitiated into the thrills of Roberto Bolaño's fiction, and an indispensable addition to an ecstatic and transgressive body of work.

Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared. In the words of The Washington Post, "With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals."

Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager - our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us - she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness at night, and drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can drift lower . . . Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita - one of the last novels Roberto Bolaño published - delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of ones fate.