The Savage Detectives Reread

The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.

Stories of the "failed generation" set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe.

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

With an afterword by Natasha Wimmer. Winner of the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. New Year’s Eve 1975, Mexico City. Two hunted men leave town in a hurry, on the desert-bound trail of a vanished poet. Spanning two decades and crossing continents, theirs is a remarkable quest through a darkening universe – our own. It is a journey told and shared by a generation of lovers, rebels and readers, whose testimonies are woven together into one of the most dazzling Latin American novels of the twentieth century.

Considered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first century, Helen DeWitt’s brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his biological father, the boy decides that he can do better. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to find a suitable father. The novel’s cult-classic status did not come easy: it underwent a notoriously tortuous publication process and briefly went out of print. Lee Konstantinou combines a riveting reading of The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at DeWitt’s fraught experiences with corporate publishing. He shows how interpreting the ambition and richness of DeWitt’s work in light of her struggles with literary institutions provides a potent social critique. The novel helps us think about our capacity for learning and creativity, revealing the constraints that capitalism and material deprivation impose on intellectual flourishing. Drawing on interviews with DeWitt and other key figures, Konstantinou explores the book’s composition and its history with Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s media empire. He argues that The Last Samurai allegorizes its troubled relationship with the institutions and middlemen that ferried it into the world. What’s ultimately at stake in Ludo’s quest is not only who might make a good father but also how we might fulfill our potential in a world that often seems cruelly designed to thwart that very possibility.

One of the remarkable qualities of Bolaño's short stories is that they seem to tell what Bolaño called 'the secret story', 'the one we'll never know'. The Return contains thirteen unforgettable tales bent on returning to haunt you, most of them appearing in English for the first time here. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolaño story is just as likely to concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend, the history of a porn star or two embittered police detectives debating their favourite weapons: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot - and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolaño's own, of course).

Few writers rankle like Jonathan Franzen. Despite popular acclaim, robust sales, and august literary laurels, Franzen’s polarizing persona shares the spotlight with—and sometimes steals it from—his tragicomic novels of Midwestern family life. In this reconsideration of Freedom (2010), L. Gibson explores the difficulty of coming to terms with Jonathan Franzen. Freedom Reread considers the author’s distinctive narrative technique in light of the contradictions for which he is renowned: widely read curmudgeon, tweeted-about luddite, self-proclaimed partisan of fiction who frequently announces the novel’s death. Bookended by autofictional forays into the process of—and resistance to—taking a definite stance on Franzen, this book places Freedom in conversation with a playful, idiosyncratic array of interlocutors, including Middlemarch and You’ve Got Mail, Amitav Ghosh on climate change and Susan Sontag on metaphor, speculative fiction and Succession. Avowedly ambivalent about Franzen, Gibson offers both a fresh appreciation of the author’s work and a searching critical analysis of his pronouncements on the novel’s fate. Wide-ranging and stylistically ambitious, Freedom Reread delivers an assured, artful inquiry into Franzen’s novelistic technique and public persona.

A deluxe edition of Bolano’s complete poetry Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolano 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?” Bolano 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 Bolano’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.”