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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.

9781933633831 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.

Bolaño Roberto 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.

9780811217149 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.

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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.

0811216349 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.

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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.

0811215865 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.'

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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).

0140442073 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.

Nietzsche Friedrich 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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Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. Boston. 1990. South End Press. 0896082938. 508 pages. paperback. Cover by Todd Jailer and Cynthia Peters.

0896082938 DESCRIPTION - From the Red Scare of 1919-1920 to the McCarthy period of the 1950s to the COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) era of the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has operated primarily as America’s political police. Set against this sordid background. the complex of FBI operations conducted against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, including murder, kidnapping, and a range of other illegal activities, provides a shocking indictment of the lawlessness of the ‘law enforcers.’ Contrary to official announcements that COINTELPRO-type activities ended in 1971, Churchill and Vander Wall demonstrate that the FBI not only continued them, but in some cases actually increased their levels of intensity and violence. Agents of Repression concludes with consideration of recent FBI attempts to disrupt or destroy the Puerto Rican Independence movement and the Central America sanctuary and solidarity movements. Profusely illustrated and indexed, Agents of Repression will undoubtedly serve as the benchmark text for those concerned with under- standing not only what happened to the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, but the functional reality of America’s political police. ‘This study gives a chilling account of the government attack against the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party, placed in the context of the traditional use of the FBI for domestic political repression. It is a powerful indictment, with far-reaching implications concerning the treatment of political activists, especially those that are black or native American, and the functioning of our political institutions generally.’ - Noam Chomsky.

Churchill Ward Ward Churchill is a member of the Governing Council of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement, Coordinator of American Indian Studies for the University of Colorado/Boulder, and author of From a Native Son. Jim Vander Wall is an active supporter of the struggles of Native People for sovereignty and has written several articles on FBI. He is co-author, with Ward Churchill, of Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars on the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (1988) and an editor of New Studies on the Left.

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Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott. Princeton. 2012. Princeton University Press. 9780691155296. 10 halftones. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2. 208 pages. hardcover.

9780691155296 DESCRIPTION - James Scott taught us what's wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing - one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions. Through a wide-ranging series of memorable anecdotes and examples, the book describes an anarchist sensibility that celebrates the local knowledge, common sense, and creativity of ordinary people. The result is a kind of handbook on constructive anarchism that challenges us to radically reconsider the value of hierarchy in public and private life, from schools and workplaces to retirement homes and government itself. Beginning with what Scott calls the law of anarchist calisthenics, an argument for law-breaking inspired by an East German pedestrian crossing, each chapter opens with a story that captures an essential anarchist truth. In the course of telling these stories, Scott touches on a wide variety of subjects: public disorder and riots, desertion, poaching, vernacular knowledge, assembly-line production, globalization, the petty bourgeoisie, school testing, playgrounds, and the practice of historical explanation. Far from a dogmatic manifesto, Two Cheers for Anarchism celebrates the anarchist confidence in the inventiveness and judgment of people who are free to exercise their creative and moral capacities.

Scott James C AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Campbell Scott (December 2, 1936 – July 19, 2024) was an American political scientist and anthropologist specializing in comparative politics. He was a comparative scholar of agrarian and non-state societies. Trained as a political scientist, Scott's scholarship discussed peasant societies, state power, and political resistance. From 1968 to 1985, Scott wrote influentially on agrarian politics in peninsular Malaysia. While he retained a lifelong interest in Southeast Asia and peasantries, his later works ranged across many topics: quiet forms of political resistance, the failures of state-led social transformation, techniques used by non-state societies to avoid state control, commonplace uses of anarchist principles, and the rise of early agricultural states. His posthumous book, In Praise of Floods, is expected to be published in February 2025. The New York Times described his research as "highly influential and idiosyncratic". Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his MA and PhD in political science from Yale. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1976 and then at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Political Science. In 1991, he became director of Yale's Program in Agrarian Studies. At the time of his death, The New York Times described Scott as among the most widely read social scientists.

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Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick. New York. 1967. Berkley Books. 160 pages. paperback. X1372.

berkley counter clock world x1372 DESCRIPTION - THE DEAD GROW YOUNG. Now that the Hobart Phase was in effect, Officer Joseph Tinbane wasn't surprised when he would hear a voice speaking to him from beneath the ground. It wasn't that he was going out of his mind. Not at all. It was just one of the "old-born," giving notification that it was ready to be dug up. You see, the year is 1998 and things have changed quite a bit. Time has reversed its flow: the dead come back to life, and people grow younger instead of older. It sounds a little strange - and why it's called the COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD.

Dick Philip K Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,’ Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.’ In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

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Poetry Come Out of My Mouth: Selected Poems of Mario Papasquiaro Santiago by Mario Papasquiaro Santiago. New Orleans. 2018. Dialogos Books. 9781944884406. Translated from the Spanish by Arturo Mantecon. Artwork by Maceo Montoya. Introduction by Ilan Stavans. 231 pages. paperback. Cover art by Maceo Montoya.

9781944884406 DESCRIPTION - This first major selection in English of the poems of the great infrarealist poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro collects work from Aullido de cisne (1996), Jeta de santo (2008) and Arte & basura (2012). Masterfully translated by Arturo Mantecón, with original artwork by Maceo Montoya, hopefully Poetry Comes out of My Mouth will bring recognition to one of the most important Mexican poets of the twentieth century. The poetry of legendary Mexican poet Mario Santiago Papasquiaro is little known in the USA. Closest friend of Roberto Bolaño (he is Ulises Lima in his Los Detectives Salvajes), Mario Santiago’s poetry flies in the most hallucinatory manner out of the tangled mass of Mexico’s heritage. Fusing the supernal and infernal energies of César Vallejo and Allen Ginsberg, this non-stop automatic-rifle poetry has few peers in contemporary poetry anywhere, and the meticulous translations of Arturo Mantecón superbly render this often difficult stylist into an English equally explosive and eloquent. With this potpourri of past and present, imagined and unimaginable visions, Santiago puts himself over the edge, racing as it were to his own destruction.—Ivan Argüelles, author of The Invention of Spain and Madonna Septet. Mario Santiago writes not only with brilliance, but pays homage to his many influences—from the Beat poets to Artaud—whom he turns into his family in a theater of cultural references and, as a communist, makes them all part of his fundamental, historical rage for justice, love and transformation in an epoch steeped in drugs, lunacy and spontaneous righteousness. Arturo Mantecón’s majestic translations reveal Santiago’s mastery of lyricism and poetic drama. If you find yourself reading yourself when you read this book, don’t say I didn’t tell you so—that’s how great Santiago is.—Jack Hirschmanm, author of All That’s Left and Front Lines. Every line of these poems pack little explosions of beauty, thought, rage, joy, that coalesce into a radiant blaze. I found myself bouncing in my chair as I read, carried by the language’s irresistible exuberance, and Arturo Mantecón’s on-fire translations. These poems make fresh a youthful spirit and language from a lost time. Mario Santiago still drives solemn pompous Mexican critics crazy; some are deeply annoyed that his friend and champion Roberto Bolaño’s fame have brought these poems new attention. I love the poems that take on some of Mexico’s sacred foundational myths, and far from merely subverting them, unexpectedly humanize these majestic figures and bring them so close, in poems that drum their honest, brilliantly jiving yet humble beat inside of you: “the children of my children will transmit my vision in their own way.”—Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name and The Art of Political Murder.

Papasquiaro Santiago Mario AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mario Santiago Papasquiaro is the pen name of José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda (Mexico City, December 25, 1953–1998), Mexican poet and co-founder of the infrarrealista poetry movement. Papasquiaro was born in 1953 in Mexico City. Papasquiaro's first reading was at the Museo Nacional de San Carlos in 1973. In 1976, he founded the Infrarrealismo (Infrarealism) movement along with Roberto Bolaño, Cuauhtémoc Méndez Estrada, Ramón Méndez Estrada, Bruno Montané, Rubén Medina, Juan Esteban Harrington, Óscar Altamirano, José Peguero, Guadalupe Ochoa, José Vicente Anaya, Pedro Damián Bautista, and Mara Larrosa. Santiago inspired the character of Ulises Lima in fellow infrarealist Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives. Like Santiago, the Lima character is an eccentric adventurer, and an opponent of the traditional forms of writers who sold out for state scholarships. Santiago frequently made enemies due to his sincerity and open criticism of what he deemed inferior forms of poetry, the literary elite, and poets themselves. He has gained slight recognition, though he is recognized and lauded by the recorded oral testimonies of his "comrades-in-arms". He died after being hit by a motorist on January 10, 1998, in Mexico City. His poems were collected in Aullido de cisne, published in 1996. The last poem he wrote was EME ESE PE, published in La Jornada newspaper days before his death. Santiago is considered by many to be the principal exponent and purest stylistic representative of the infrarealism movement, a vanguard literary movement representing a rupture with the Mexican literary establishment. His poems are complex, erudite, and highly metaphorical. Santiago sought an aesthetic of signs, much like the calligrams of Guillaume Apollinaire. The majority of his work is still unpublished.

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Sangrando por los 5 sentidos / Bleeding From All 5 Senses by Mario Papasquiaro Santiago. Buffalo. 2019. White Pine Press. 9781945680311. Translated from the Spanish by Cole Heinowitz. Winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. 166 pages. paperback.

9781945680311 DESCRIPTION - Most readers have never heard of José Alfredo Zendejas Pineda (1953-1998). A few might know him by his pseudonym, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. But many readers know (and even love) the quasi-mythical character he inspired, Ulises Lima, from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives: “a ticking time bomb” who wrote incessantly “in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing,” but who “never wrote poems.” The real Santiago did, in fact, fill every page he could find with his words. And he may indeed have been “a ticking time bomb.” But―for the record―he did write poems. “The raucous energy and desperate inventiveness of Bleeding From All 5 Senses takes on a second life in Heinowitz’s sinuous translations of Papasquiaro. Melding persistent social and emotional urgency, Bleeding from All 5 Senses affectively embodies something vital of our tumultuous world. In a compendium of tones ranging from the slyly humorous to the jarringly serious, Heinowitz renders Papasquiaro’s poems with meticulous care and creativity. Heinowitz conveys the intensity and music of Papasquiaro’s voice in English in such a way that the poet’s language takes on new valences of meaning in both United States and international anglophone contexts. Heinowitz’s translation of Papasquiaro’s roving tonal shifts, idiosyncratic syntax, and mosaic of sociocultural concerns makes a new and useful contribution to contemporary anglophone poetry.” ― Cliff Becker Prize Judges Daniel Borzutzky, Aaron Coleman, and Mani Rao. “Mario Santiago Papasquiaro ignited a blaze that continues to burn. In his manuscripts, asterisks fall like sparks announcing flames. Each of his texts is the scene of intense daring: the poet enters the ring to deal his own shadow a knockout blow. Rarely has literature been put to the test with such courage. Mario despises feints; he does not try to bedazzle but he does play with fire. Convinced that true victory is in the flesh, he shows us the scars with which he writes the body.”―Juan Villoro. "I think the illuminating side of his work as a poet is still revealing itself. One merit of his poetry (and one that people may not be aware of) was that which distinguished him from the writers he admired―for example, his ability to portray a particular dimension of the coarseness of urban life (more prominent now than ever) that still hadn’t been expressed in Mexican poetry, despite the achievements of Efraín Huerta, the innovations of Salvador Novo and Renato Leduc, and the creative maneuverings of the Stridentists. Mario Santiago took his role as Mexico City’s flâneur very seriously, and a significant portion of his poetic visions are derived from real experiences. He managed to validate his own field of vision and to offer forth, from that vantage point, the sum of his impressions."―Claudia Kerik.