Roberto Bolaño

"Cuatro academicos tras la pista de un enigmatico escritor aleman; un periodista de Nueva York en su primer trabajo en Mexico; un filosofo viudo; un detective de policia enamorado de una esquiva mujer--estos son algunos de los personajes arrastrados hasta la ciudad fronteriza de Santa Teresa, donde en la ultima decada han desaparecido cientos de mujeres"--Back cover. An American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interact...

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Márquez of his generation. In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes—the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself—on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe.

Brilliantly rendered into English

...

Los cuentos de Bolaño condensan en el breve espacio que caracteriza las obras del género todo su universo literario, uno de los más rupturistas y personales de la literatura contemporánea en español: la literatura que lo impregna todo; la sexualidad; las vidas de seres que pese a ser comunes, transcurren entre lo cotidiano y lo extraordinario; la rebeldía de aquellos que viven en la estrecha frontera que separa el sistema de la marginalidad;...

"On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war-game 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...

The star in this hair-raising novel is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an Air Force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup in Chile to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise that symbolizes the darkness of Pinochet's regime.