Last Evenings On Earth

(Paperback)

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Description

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolano's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. '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 protege 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 Bolano 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 Bolano's 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 Bolano has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature will be sorely missed' Guardian

Reviews

The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world
Bolao'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 Bolao's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century. -- Lauren Groff
Roberto Bolao was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled. -- Mariana Enrquez
Roberto Bolao's fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental. * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.