Short Stories by Roberto Bolaño

January 30, 2008 10:47 AM

7 short stories by Roberto Bolaño Gómez Palacio, The Insufferable Gaucho, Álvaro Rousselot’s Journey, Phone Calls, Dance Card. From Nazi Literature in the Americas: Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce, Luz Mendiluce Thompson & Ernesto Pérez Masón and The Fabulous Schiaffino Boys. If you know the fiction of Roberto Bolaño you know what you're in for. If you don't, any of these stories is a good place to start, though the first three are perhaps the most natural starting points.

One more story in audio form: A Literary Adventure [Miette's Bedtime Story Podcast]
Poems: Self Portrait at Twenty Years and My Life in the Tubes of Survival.
Interviews with his two main English language translators Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer.
Biographical Essay on Bolaño by Wimmer. [pdf]
Carmen Boullosa, a friend and contemporary of Bolaño's, describes the literary scene the young Bolaño participated in during the 70's.
Paul Berman explains how Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives fits into the literary history of Latin America.

[Bolaño previously on MetaFilter]

posted by Kattullus (10 comments total)

I was in the doldrums last summer and fall and I hadn't read a single book of fiction for almost three months when I happened to read The Insufferable Gaucho in The New Yorker and just had to read more by Bolaño. I blazed through Last Evenings on Earth in a couple of days and immediately went and got The Savage Detectives and read through that and then Amulet. So in some ways I owe Bolaño my reading life.
posted by Kattullus at 10:50 AM on January 30, 2008

Love Bolaño. Anyone know when 2666 will be translated and released?
posted by billysumday at 10:55 AM on January 30, 2008

I don't have an exact date for 2666, but I'm 90% sure that it'll be out this fall.
posted by mekanic at 11:37 AM on January 30, 2008

2666 is supposed to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, nothing on the website as to when it will be released.
posted by shothotbot at 11:40 AM on January 30, 2008

Kattullus: I have both The Savage Detectives and Amulet on my 'want to read list'. Do you recommend one over the other?
posted by chupacabra at 12:02 PM on January 30, 2008

Great post.
posted by Mocata at 12:06 PM on January 30, 2008

I recommend The Savage Detectives over Amulet. Amulet is a longer version of one of the chapters in The Savage Detectives.
posted by Kattullus at 12:09 PM on January 30, 2008

Savage Detectives will finally be out in paperback in early March. I have been waiting patiently, patiently. (Thanks, Kattullus!)
posted by steef at 1:18 PM on January 30, 2008

Wow, thanks for this post. I recently read Last Evenings on Earth and Distant Star -- what haunting little books they are. I should be getting my copy of Nazi Literature in the Americas today, and I can't wait to read it.
posted by cobra libre at 3:34 PM on January 30, 2008

Bolaño's The Savage Detectives has been banned by the Texas jail system.
posted by Kattullus at 9:03 PM on February 7, 2008