Posthumous Stories - Roberto Bolaño;Chris Andrews;Natasha Wimmer

“One of the more colorful gods in the pantheon of international literary myth . . . [Bolaño] follows his restless talent down every available rabbit hole.” —Sam Anderson, New York

“When I read Roberto Bolaño, I think: Everything is possible again.” —Nicole Krauss, author of To Be a Man

. . . because stories like this don’t have an ending . . .

Gathering the short works, in various states of completion, found on Roberto Bolaño’s computer shortly after his death, Posthumous Stories is animated by indeterminacy. Fragments of fantasies, memories, monologues, fears, and dreams proceed one into the other, seeming neither to begin nor to end. Each is haunted by time: its tick, its weight, its eternity. Forever open, and forever becoming, these stories make collaborators of us all, and offer, like a ghost, the great gift of infinity.

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) was the author of The Savage Detectives and 2666, among many other notable works. Born in Santiago, Chile, he later lived in Mexico City, Paris, and Barcelona. His accolades include the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He died at the age of fifty and is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation.

Chris Andrews has translated books of prose fiction by César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, Liliana Colanzi, and Ágota Kristóf, among others. He is also the author of How to Do Things with Forms and The Oblong Plot.

Natasha Wimmer is a translator of contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction. She is a regular visiting lecturer at Princeton University and Columbia University, and she has written reviews and criticism for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Praise for Roberto Bolaño

“Bolaño was possessed of a genius that was totalizing and inscrutable . . . [He] delighted in annihilating narrative expectations and took dreams and nightmares as seriously as waking reality.”
—Adam Mansbach, Los Angeles Times

“To encounter Bolaño at a particular time in one’s life is to be psychically branded . . . He is a kinetic, epiphanic writer . . . [His] works tremble like a whirring, unpredictable machine.”
—Dustin Illingworth, The Paris Review

“A master of the short form . . . Taking the plunge may be terrifying, but it is also essential—and unforgettable.”
—Josh Weeks, The Times Literary Supplement