Books by Roberto Bolaño
Found 2 books
6. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 , by Roberto Bolano. Will make you want to read a lot more Latin American fiction.
That’s the new collection of Roberto Bolaño’s assembled bricolage, essays, speeches, and critical notes . It wins the award for “the book this year which has most made me want to read other books.” It also reveals how smart and original he was as a reader, not just as a writer. I enjoyed this passage, among many others:
Roberto Bola ñ o, 2666 . Duh. After four hundred pages of reading, I see it as less perfect than The Savage Detectives but it has greater world-historic reach and even some sprawl. A clear first choice in almost any year.
Burton Folsom, New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Legacy has Damaged America ; this book has a good compendium of free market critiques of Roosevelt, although I would not look here for a balanced review of the evidence. Senselessness , by Horacio Castellanos Moya; this is now my favorite novel from either Honduras or El Salvador, depending how you classify the nationality of the author. Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books . A fun inside h...
1. Fiction : I’ve already covered Roberto Bolaño plenty on MR; The Savage Detectives is his masterpiece but it’s all worth reading. The massive 2666 is due out later this year. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night , while hardly read in the U.S., seems to me one of the most gripping novels of the 20th century. If you read the Amazon reviews you’ll that others who have read it agree. This is one of the least read first-rate novels I know. It’s not easy going, however, and it’s taking me a...
3. 2666: A Novel , by Roberto Bolaño, you can pre-order it here. So far I’m only reading the Amazon site every few days or so, thinking about when the book will come.