Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas - Softcover

Bolaño, Roberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1509851933 ISBN 13: 9781509851935

Publisher: Picador, 2021

Synopsis

'Companionable, exotic, witty and glamorously suggestive' Observer

One more journey to the literary universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature

Roberto Bolaño’s boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into enduring fiction is unmistakable in these three exhilarating novellas.

In ‘Cowboy Graves’, Arturo Belano – Bolaño’s alter ego – returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. ‘French Comedy of Horrors’ takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen-year-old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in ‘Fatherland’, a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a master of contemporary fiction. These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño’s extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his great triumphs, while deepening our understanding of his profound gifts.

About this title

About the Author

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and 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. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.

From the Back Cover

Praise for ROBERTO BOLAÑO

‘One of the greatest and most distinctive voices in modern fiction . . . Readers who have snacked on a writer such as Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolaño.’ Sunday Times

‘Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world.’ Guardian

‘The most influential and admired novelist of his generation.’ Susan Sontag

‘When I read Bolaño I think: Everything is possible again. To step inside his books is to accustom yourself, as much as is possible, to walking along the edge of an abyss.’ Nicole Krauss

‘One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening.’ John Banville

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1509851933
• ISBN 13: 9781509851935
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208