Description

‘This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature…’

A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protege in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. A litany unfolds, offering sixty-nine reasons why not to dance with Pablo Neruda.

‘The melancholy folklore of exile,’ as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades the fourteen haunting stories of Last Evenings on Earth. Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano’s beloved ‘failed generation,’ this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolano’s immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer.

TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS

‘May be the most haunting and mesmerising collection I have ever read’ Daily Telegraph

‘It is a shame that Bolano has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature will be sorely missed’ Guardian

Publisher Review

The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world Bolano's language, alert and always graceful, his way of constructing narratives that are simultaneously disconcerting, brilliant and infinitely immediate, is a form of resisting evil, adversity and mediocrity * Le Monde * 'Roberto Bolano's oeuvre is among the great, blistering literary achievements of the twentieth century.' -- Lauren Groff 'Roberto Bolano was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled.' -- Mariana Enriquez 'Roberto Bolano's fiction was hallucinatory, haunting and experimental.' * Times Literary Supplement * Roberto Bolano mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolano is among the best at this diabolical skill -- Georgi Gospodinov For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close -- Marlon James It's no exaggeration to call Bolano a genius. * Washington Post *