Last Evenings on Earth [Paperback]

The melancholy folklore of exile, as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano'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.Complex and provocative.His generation's premier Latin-American writer... Bola?o's reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent.I am addicted to the haze that floats above Bola?o's fiction.If you haven't heard of Roberto Bola?o yet, you will soon.Bola?o's characters yearn for amnesia as well as for the ability to connect to someone or something in the present.Brilliant.Conjures dreamlike worlds that shock with their familiarity.Just behind the nervy, deadpan narrative a total breakdown perpetually looms.The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.Widely known in the Spanish-speaking world as the premier writer of his generation.[B]leakly luminous stories...The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bola?o. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.