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...

"A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women. "Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime": so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager--"our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us"--she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness...

As through a crack in the wall, By Night in Chile's single night-long rant provides a terrifying, clandestine view of the strange bedfellows of church and state in Chile. This wild, eerily compact novel-Roberto Bolaño's first work available in English-recounts the tale of a poor boy who wanted to be a poet, but ends up a half-hearted Jesuit priest and conservative literary critic, a sort of lapdog to the rich and powerful cultural elite, in whose...

Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Bolao touted poetry as the superior art form. This collection showcases Bolao's gift for freely crossing genres, with poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized.

"Set in Mexico in the 1970s, the novel charts the literary and romantic escapades of two Chilean aspiring writers, employing a range of genres, from epistolary novel to science fiction to satire"--