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The Unknown University by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2013. New Directions. 9780811219280. Translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy. 835 pages. hardcover. Translation of La universidad desconocida.

DESCRIPTION - Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolaño touted poetry as the superior art form, able to approach an infinity in which you become infinitely small without disappearing. When asked, “What makes you believe you’re a better poet than a novelist?” Bolaño replied, “The poetry makes me blush less.” The sum of his life s work in his preferred medium, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolaño’s gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. Poetry, he believed, is braver than anyone.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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Tres by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2011. New Directions. 9780811219273. Translated from the Spanish by Laura Healy. 174 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral. Translation of Tres.

DESCRIPTION - ‘Poetry is braver than anyone,' Roberto Bolaño believed, and the proof is here in Tres, his most inventive and bracing poetry collection. Roberto Bolaño0's Tres is a showcase of the author's willingness to freely cross genres, with poems in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized. As the title implies, the collection is composed of three sections. ‘Prose from Autumn in Gerona,' a cinematic series of prose poems, slowly reveals a subtle and emotional tale of unrequited love by presenting each scene, shattering it, and piecing it all back together, over and over again. The second part, ‘The Neochileans,' is a sort of On the Road in verse, which narrates the travels of a young Chilean band on tour in the far reaches of their country. Finally, the collection ends with a series of short poems that take us on ‘A Stroll Through Literature' and remind us of Bolaño's masterful ability to walk the line between the comically serious and the seriously comical.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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The Insufferable Gacho by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2010. New Directions. 9780811217163. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. 164 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Allen Frame. Jacket design by Semadar Megged. Translation of El gaucho insufrible.

DESCRIPTION - A trove of strange, arresting, short masterworks - five stories and two essays - by Roberto Bolaño, a writer who pulls bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat. 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 INSUFFERABLE GAUCHO contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bolaño story might concern an elusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bolaño's stories have been applauded as ‘bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated' (Publishers Weekly) and ‘complex and provocative' (International Herald Tribune), and as Francine Prose said in The New York Times Book Review, ‘something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.' Two fascinating essays are also included.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2011. Farrar Straus Giroux. 9780374275624. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. 277 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Rodrigo Corral and Charlotte Strick. Jacket photographs: Wall and light switch by Frederick Schmitt; beach by Massimo Vitali/Gallery Stock.

DESCRIPTION - On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals - the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado - and to the darker side of life in a resort town. Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo's well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo's favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game's consequences may be all too real. Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death, THE THIRD REICH is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own - and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and 2666.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2012. New Directions. 9780811218153. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer. 144 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Rodrigo Corral. Translation of El Secreto del Mal.

DESCRIPTION - THE SECRET OF EVIL opens the computer file of all the texts Bolaño was working on at his death: a glimpse of what was coming from ‘one of those rare writers who write for a future time - we have only begun to appreciate his strange, oblique genius.' - John Banville. A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller urgently needing to pass on information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation's political ills. The members of the Tel Quel group abscond from a photo to pursue intellectual and erotic adventures. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano's son Geronimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie pandemonium as allegory. The various pieces in THE SECRET OF EVIL extend the intricate, single web that is the work of Roberto Bolaño. CONTENTS: Preliminary note -- Colonia Lindavista -- The secret of evil -- The old man of the mountain -- The colonel's son -- Scholars of sodom -- The room next door -- Labyrinth -- Vagaries of the literature of doom -- Crimes -- I can't read -- Beach -- Muscles -- The tour -- Daniela -- Suntan -- Death of Ulises -- The trouble-maker -- Sevilla kills me -- The days of chaos.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations by Roberto Bolaño. Brooklyn. 2009. Melville House Publishers. 9781933633831. Translated from the Spanish by Sybil Perez. Introduction by Marcela Valdes. 126 pages. paperback. Cover photo by Basso Cannarsa.

DESCRIPTION - With the release of Roberto Bolaño's THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in 1998, journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer ‘capable of befriending his readers.' After exchanging several letters with Bolaño, Maristain formed a friendship of her own, culminating in an extensive interview with the novelist about truth and consequences, an interview that turned out to be Bolaño's last. Appearing for the first time in English, Bolaño's final interview is accompanied by a collection of conversations with reporters stationed throughout Latin America, providing a rich context for the work of the writer who, according to essayist Marcela Valdes, is ‘a T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American letters.' As in all of Bolaño's work, there is also wide-ranging discussion of the author's many literary influences. (Explanatory notes on authors and titles that may be unfamiliar to English-language readers are included here.) The interviews, all of which were completed during the writing of the gigantic 2666, also address Bolaño's deepest personal concerns, from his domestic life and two young children to the realities of a fatal disease.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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Monsieur Pain by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2010. New Directions. 9780811217149. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. 134 pages. hardcover. Jacket art - detail of a photograph by Allen Frame, Jacket design Semadar Megged. Translation of Monsieur Pain.

DESCRIPTION - Paris, 1938. The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo is in the hospital, unable to stop hiccupping. His wife calls on an acquaintance of her friend Madame Reynaud: the mesmerist Monsieur Pain. A timid bachelor, Pain is in love with the widow Reynaud, and agrees to try to use his powers to help save the poet's life. But then two mysterious Spanish agents intervene, determined to keep him from treating the patient. Terrible anxiety enters the story - along with another practitioner of the occult sciences, tarot cards, nightmares, Mme Curie, WWII, hopeless love, and an assassination. Poor Monsieur Pain, haunted and guilty, wanders the crepuscular, rainy streets of Paris. . . One of Roberto Bolano's most moving and tender novels, Monsieur Pain creates a galaxy of historical figures (Cesar Vallejo and his wife Georgette, the mesmerist Pierre Pain, and Mme Curie and her daughter Irene all actually existed) only to explode it gleefully in a final ‘Epilogue for Voices,' scattering the docudrama and opening the book onto vast, untold hinterlands.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2006. New Directions. 0811216349. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. 219 pages. hardcover. Jacket art - detail of 'Mariachis, Mexico City, 2000' by Allen Frame.

DESCRIPTION - ‘The melancholy folklore of exile,' as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolaño's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid. In the short story ‘Silva the Eye,' Bolaño writes in the opening sentence: ‘It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died.' Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolaño's beloved ‘failed generation,' the stories of LAST EVENINGS ON EARTH have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2004. New Directions. 0811215865. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. Paperback Original. 149 pages. paperback. NDP993. Cover design by Semadar Megged. Translation of Estrella distante.

DESCRIPTION - The star of Roberto Bolaño's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multi-media enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this ‘star' in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolaño's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolaño's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel BY NIGHT IN CHILE as ‘a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.') Many Chilean authors have written about the ‘bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders,' Richard Eder commented in The New York Times: ‘None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolaño.'

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. New York. 1971. Penguin Books. 0140442073. Translated from the German & With An Introduction and Commentary by R. J. Hollingdale. 208 pages. paperback. The cover shows a detail from 'The Isle of the Dead' by Arnold Bocklin, in the Museum der Bildenden Kunste, Leipzig (photo Gerhard Reinhold). 

DESCRIPTION - TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, which was written by Nietzsche (1844-1900) in 1888, the year before he went mad, briefly summarizes his views on almost the whole range of his philosophical interests. It remarkably fulfils his ambition to ‘say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book’. THE ANTI-CHRIST, written immediately afterwards, is his longest and least restrained polemic against Christianity and Christian morals, and is expressed in his most vivid and forceful style. The two books in this volume are linked by a special commentary with Nietzsche’s other works.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's key ideas include perspectivism, the Will to Power, the 'death of God', the Übermensch and eternal recurrence. One of the key tenets of his philosophy is the concept of 'life-affirmation,' which embraces the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond. It further champions the creative powers of the individual to strive beyond social, cultural, and moral contexts. Nietzsche's attitude towards religion and morality was marked with atheism, psychologism and historism; he considered them to be human creations loaded with the error of confusing cause and effect. His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary, and his influence remains substantial, particularly in the continental philosophical schools of existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism. His ideas of individual overcoming and transcendence beyond structure and context have had a profound impact on late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century thinkers, who have used these concepts as points of departure in the development of their philosophies. Most recently, Nietzsche's reflections have been received in various philosophical approaches that move beyond humanism, e.g., transhumanism. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist—a scholar of Greek and Roman textual criticism—before turning to philosophy. In 1869, at age twenty-four, he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, the youngest individual to have held this position. He resigned in the summer of 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889, at age forty-four, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. The breakdown was later ascribed to atypical general paresis due to tertiary syphilis, but this diagnosis has come into question. Re-examination of Nietzsche's medical evaluation papers show that he almost certainly died of brain cancer. Nietzsche lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, after which he fell under the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche until his death in 1900. As his caretaker, his sister assumed the roles of curator and editor of Nietzsche's manuscripts. Förster-Nietzsche was married to a prominent German nationalist and antisemite, Bernhard Förster, and reworked Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her own ideology, often in ways contrary to Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were strongly and explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism (see Nietzsche's criticism of antisemitism and nationalism). Through Förster-Nietzsche's editions, Nietzsche's name became associated with German militarism and Nazism, although later twentieth-century scholars have counteracted this conception of his ideas.

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