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.
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Now in paperback — the sole collection of the great Chilean writer’s essays
Between Parentheses collects Roberto Bolaño’s nonfiction: fiercely opinionated articles, speeches, essays, and talks, as well as most of the newspaper columns he wrote during the last five years of his life, when fame had come to him at last. Here we have a tender account of his return to Chile, reflections on family life, impassioned takes on books by writers Bolaño admired (or vehemently despised), and advice on how to write a short story.
Between Parentheses fully lives up to Bolaño’s own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity on all levels.”
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.
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
A spellbinder.
—Newsweek
Bolaño has proven that literature can do anything.
—Jonathan Lethem
Lies and memoirs get along swimmingly.
—Roberto Bolaño
The closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography.’
—Ignacio Echevarría
Electrifying.
—Time
The very highest level of literary achievement.
—Colm Tóibín
An exemplary literary rebel.
—Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books
Bolaño’s judgments are a joy to read. Between Parentheses is a treasure chest: filled with odd glittering jewels and fistfuls of gold. In these essays we hear Bolaño’s real voice, the one he often disguised through the ventriloquism of his fiction.
