Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile in 1953 and died in Catalonia in 2003. He was widely regarded as the essential Latin American writer of our age. He was best known for his novels (including The Savage Detectives, which won a number of prestigious literary awards, Nocturno de Chile, translated as By Night in Chile, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award) and his short stories, first published in English in Last Evenings on Earth.
This novel is an elegy for a generation. * Independent * The comic frenzy, the inventiveness of character and situation, and the mood-soaked depiction of 1970s Mexico is delightful. * Times Literary Supplement * It’s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius. The Savage Detectives alone should grant him immortality. * Washington Post * My favorite writer . . . The Savage Detectives is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come. -- Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love An exuberantly sprawling, politically charged picaresque novel. * Elle * Roberto Bolaño's masterwork * Vogue * The most influential and admired novelist of his generation in the Spanish-speaking world. For stunning wit, brutal honesty, loving humanity and a heart that bleeds into the simplest of words, no other writer ever came close. An exemplary literary rebel * New York Review of Books *