Roberto Bolaño streaked across the literary firmament, leaving behind remarkable traces of his passage—nine novels, two collections of short stories, five volumes of poems—that are just becoming known to English-speaking audiences. Indeed he did not begin to publish until he was in his forties, and it was not until just before his death at 50, in 2003, that he tasted fame. But increasing numbers of readers and writers consider Bolaño to be the most original talent of the age. The Savage Detectives, which he called a love letter to his generation, is his masterpiece. It follows two poets on an epic, if bittersweet, journey from Mexico City to Europe and back, ending in the Sonora Desert. Voices, stories, and jokes proliferate as romance gives way to a recognition of the limits of love, of poetry, of life—and the writing is so swift and sure that it is hard not to keep reading.

Amulet
Last Evenings on Earth
Distant Star
By Night in Chile

by Roberto Bolaño
translated by Chris Andrews
Publisher: New Directions

Bolaño's shorter works of fiction are no less dazzling than The Savage Detectives. The storytelling is just as compelling, and indeed a character from one novel may show up in another. His fictional stand-in, Arturo Belano, is never far from the action, since poets, the quintessential outsiders, play leading roles in Bolaño's universe. And the emotional fallout from Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup against Salvador Allende is everywhere on display. Here's a pilot, the founder of New Chilean Poetry, skywriting his verses over the Andes, above the heads of political prisoners. Here's the deathbed confession of a priest who reveals the dark machinations of church and state in Pinochet's dictatorship. And here's the Mother of Mexican Poetry recalling the violence that has so indelibly marked contemporary Latin American history, which comes thrillingly to life in Bolaño's books.