Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts.

The Guardian

Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: a trove of strangely arresting, short master works.

The Return

Fiction by Roberto Bolaño

Translated from Spanish by Chris Andrews

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolaño’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolaño story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot––and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolaño’s own).

Paperback(published Jul, 29 2010)

ISBN
9780811219051
Price US
14.95
Price CN
16
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
208

Clothbound(published Jul, 29 2010)

ISBN
9780811217156
Price US
23.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
224

Ebook(published Jul, 29 2010)

ISBN
9780811220576
Price US
23.95
Page Count
224
Portrait of Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño

Twentieth-century Chilean poet and novelist

Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts.

The Guardian

Although the thirteen stories that make up Roberto Bolaño’s newly translated collection percolate with brooding darkness, they also bubble with a surprising luminosity…each richer and more resonant than the last.

Time Out New York

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.

Los Angeles Times

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

Booklist

Dark, intimate, and sneakily touching: there is gold to be found in this collection.

Michael Greenberg, The New York Review of Books