This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...
A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protégé in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. A litany unfolds, offering sixty-nine reasons why not to dance with Pablo Neruda.
The melancholy folklore of exile, as Roberto Bolańo once put it, pervades the fourteen haunting stories of Last Evenings on Earth. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano's beloved failed generation, this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolańos immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer.
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS
May be the most haunting and mesmerising collection I have ever read Daily Telegraph
It is a shame that Bolańo has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature will be sorely missed Guardian
Recenzijos
The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world Bolańo's language, alert and always graceful, his way of constructing narratives that are simultaneously disconcerting, brilliant and infinitely immediate, is a form of resisting evil, adversity and mediocrity * Le Monde * Roberto Bolańo's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century. -- Lauren Groff Roberto Bolańo was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled. -- Mariana Enrķquez Roberto Bolańo's fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental. * Times Literary Supplement * Roberto Bolańo mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolańo is among the best at this diabolical skill -- Georgi Gospodinov For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close -- Marlon James Its no exaggeration to call Bolańo a genius. * Washington Post *
Roberto Bolańo (Author) Roberto Bolańo was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolańo died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.
Chris Andrews (Translator) Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He teaches in the department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies of the University of Melbourne. His translation of Roberto Bolańo's Distant Star in 2005 won the prestigious Valle-Inclįn Prize.
