Last Evenings on Earth
Description
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.
"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño 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.
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.
Praise for Last Evenings on Earth
Complex and provocative.
— International Herald Tribune
His generation's premier Latin-American writer... Bolaño's reputation and legend are in meteoric ascent.
— Larry Rohter - The New York Times
I am addicted to the haze that floats above Bolaño's fiction.
— Wayne Kostenbaum - Bookforum
If you haven't heard of Roberto Bolaño yet, you will soon.
— Benjamin Lytal - The New York Sun
Bolaño's characters yearn for amnesia as well as for the ability to connect to someone or something in the present.
— Stephanie Hanson - Los Angeles Times
Brilliant.
— Kirkus Reviews
Conjures dreamlike worlds that shock with their familiarity.
— Philip Herter - St. Petersburg Times
Just behind the nervy, deadpan narrative a total breakdown perpetually looms.
— Andersen Tepper - Village Voice
The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world.
— Susan Sontag
Widely known in the Spanish-speaking world as the premier writer of his generation.
— Dan Pope - Hartford Courant
[B]leakly luminous stories...
— Publishers Weekly