| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780811216883 | | Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation | | Publish Date: 4/1/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 204180564 | | Item#: RWV5D4 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8H x 5.25L x 0.75T | | Pages: 224 |
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| | | "The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories--the first short-story collection in English by acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano.
Annotation:
Roberto Bolano, a Chilean writer living in exile in Spain after the 1973 coup, writes with an oddly cool tone; despite his Leftist tendencies and the horrors taking place in Chile under Pinochet, Bolano was not one to turn polemical, and his heroes (if you can call them that) live in a kind of rueful detachment, an emotional limbo, cut off from the terrible events of history even as they take part in them. Similarly, they seem incapable of loving properly, as if their political helplessness has seeped into their hearts, poisoning their passions. LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH is an odd and unsettling short-story collection,
| Praise| "Exile, alienation, and a fatalistic sense of the impermanence of human connections and relations dominate this collection of 14 stories by the late (1953-2003), brilliant Chilean author [Roberto Bolano]....[A]t his best, he echoes the elliptical precision of Borges, Kafka, Mexican surrealist Juan Rulfo, and the great prestidigitator Julio Cortazar." 4/15/2006 "[Roberto] Bolano's work, at once baroque and attenuated, gives us the model for a literature that, Bartleby-like, flees itself, forgets its usual tasks, and achieves moral austerity through a prose that makes room for the blankness of pure attentiveness." - Wayne Koestenbaum September, 2006 |
| Author Bio| Roberto Bolano | | Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean poet and novelist, spent most of his life in exile from his native country. He grew up in Mexico with his parents, returned to Chile in 1972 to support President Allende, was jailed briefly after the rise of General Pinochet, fled back to Mexico and eventually settled in Spain. Despite these political influences, Bolaño rejected overtly political literature, writing sprawling, anarchistic, and satirical works that often dealt with wandering poets and the fecundity of Latin American life. He died in 2003 from longstanding liver problems. The following years saw a profusion of English translations of his work, including his masterpiece, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. |
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