Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño has joined the immortals.

Bolaño has joined the immortals.

Tres is not just a Robert Bolaño masterpiece, it’s another Bolaño masterpiece…Bolaño’s talent resides in his ability to transport the reader to the precipice of so many things, not the least of which is a euphoric whirlwind of delight. Tres is a beautiful book that transports the reader in many strange and wonderful ways.

Bolaño is always refreshing to read because things are never what they seem.

Bolaño’s spare prose lends his narrator’s account a chilly precision.

As for Bolaño, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus.

A Little Lumpen Novelita is a piece of intelligent realism without any sermons.

A Little Lumpen Novelita is brave and beautiful, a ‘quiet storm’ that reminds us what a joy it is to read Bolaño’s intimate writing.

Reading Between Parentheses is not like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Señor Bolaño. It’s like sitting on a barstool next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco, after he’s consumed a platter of Pisco Sours. You may wish to make a batch yourself before you step onto the first page.

Antwerp is a total avant-garde freakout, and among the most beautiful things Bolaño wrote.

A spellbinder.

Something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.

Never less than mesmerizing.

The very highest level of literary achievement.

An exemplary literary rebel.

They radiate the audacity of intellect, as well as the cruelty of vision, that have won their author a devoted following.

Bolaño, the phantom mega-star of global fiction since his death in 2003, thought of himself as a poet first and a novelist second. In verse, as in prose, Bolaño leads us on journeys through a surreal landscape of exile, longing, and nostalgia.

We savor all he has written, as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius.

They radiate the audacity of the intellect, as well as the cruelty of vision, that have won their author a devoted following.

Peers at the infinite through compelling, surreal and cinematic poems … beautiful.

Bolaño teeters on the brink of fantasy, but without ever detaching himself from a concrete, material world of pain and pleasure.

Bolaño was hungry, this book reminds you, for just about everything.

Its most recent poems were written fifteen years after its earliest, and many of these newer ones remind us of all the reasons why Bolaño is such a fantastic writer, one of the best of our times.

Its complexities amaze and treat us to an unexpected magical experience that one can sit down reading for hours until our eyes and brain go numb . . .

The sense of embattlement that animates the writing, and the scab-picking intensity that he brings to his obsessions, makes The Return a compelling encapsulation of Bolaño’s work.

Genius: This new collection of thirteen stories proves to be a defining sampler of Bolaño’s style, thematic concerns and favored character types.

Bolaño succeeds in conjuring the unknowable empty spaces that an obsessive mind can imagine into the private lives of others.

Despite its rawness, the brilliance is still there.

A living, breathing, true-to-life mystery with so many shades of exposure, the story’s inconclusiveness seems preordained, exquisitely inevitable.

There is something we take away from each of them, some phrase that stops us dead with admiration, or a vision that plunges us far beyond the surface of the prose.

Paragraphs demand to be reread, because they give you the feeling that you’ve missed something. You did miss something, but you won’t find it in the printed words. It’s the space around the words where you’ll find the answer.

It’s a glimpse into the process of a totemic artistic figure.

Bolaño’s writing is reliably intriguing.

Bolaño’s febrile narrative tack and occasional surreal touches bring to mind the classics of Latin American magic realism his cerebral protagonist and nonfiction borrowings are reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard and W. G. Sebald. The novel, Bolaño’s first to be translated into English, is at once occasion for celebration.

The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.

Bolaño was no political pamphleteer. And yet his characters’ angst and desires play out against the canvas of history. With his raw, barely controlled emotions, and a talent for mining the pathos, beauty, and even humor amid the horror of ordinary life, his fiction soared.

That dream, its stubborn survival despite all evidence of its defeat, would become the subject of much of Bolaño’s writing.

If you haven’t heard of Roberto Bolaño yet, you will soon.

Bolaño’s reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent.

He is by far the most exciting writer to come from South of the Rio Grande in a long time.