Last Evenings on Earth (Paperback)

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Last Evenings on Earth By Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews (Translated by) Cover Image
By Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews (Translated by)
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Staff Reviews


" Bolaño's short stories are amazing. Most of them are quietly heartbreaking, and nothing much happens, and I couldn't stop reading them. It seems like Bolaño's life was spent reckoning with the fact that real life can never be as exciting or romantic as the best books can make it seem. His stories capture this feeling: rather than tell tales that are larger-than-life, he uses everyday, beautiful images to tell stories that rarely add up to larger than the sum of their parts. The feeling of reading them, though, is so unique. He can leave the reader feeling like something is missing - in other words, exactly how it feels to be a hopelessly romantic writer. The effect is life-affirming and depressing at the same time."- Joey

— From Joey's Staff Picks

Description


The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.


"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.



In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolano 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 Bolano's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.

About the Author


Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.

The poet and translator Chris Andrews has won the Valle Inclan Prize and the French-American Translation Prize for his work.

Praise For…


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


Product Details
ISBN: 9780811216883
ISBN-10: 0811216888
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: April 30th, 2007
Pages: 256
Language: English