A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women.“Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita.Orphaned overnight as a teenager―“our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us”―she drops out of school and gets a crappy job. At night, she is plagued by a terrible brightness, and soon she drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can fall even lower… Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita―one of the last novels Roberto Bolano published―delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of one’s fate.

"This is a story about two people, but I'm the only one telling it."Many authors have wrestled with the death of a father in their writing, but few have grappled with the subject as fiercely, or as powerfully, as the brilliant Spanish writer Marcos Giralt Torrente does in Father and Son, the mesmerizing and discomfiting memoir that won him Spain's highest literary award, the Spanish National Book Award. Giralt Torrente is best known for his fiction, but it is in this often savage memoir that he demonstrates the full measure of his gifts.In the months following his father's death from cancer, Giralt Torrente could not write―until he began to write about his father. In many ways, they were strangers to each other; after his parents' relationship ended, when he was quite young, Giralt Torrente's father remained in contact with him but held himself at a distance. Silences began to linger, prompted by Giralt Torrente's anger at his father's lies and absences and perpetuated by their inability to speak about the sources of the conflicts between them. But despite their differences, they had a strong bond, and in the months leading up to his father's death from cancer, they groped toward reconciliation. Here the author commits to exploring it all, sparing neither his father nor himself, conscious of their flaws but also understanding of them. Weaving together history and personal narrative, Giralt Torrente crafts a startlingly honest account of a complex relationship, and an indelible portrait of both father and son.Beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, the award-winning translator of Roberto Bolaño, and as lyrical and clear-eyed on mourning as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Father and Son is an uncommonly gripping memoir by an uncommonly talented writer.

Product Description: The brightest gleamings from Bolano’s unpublished fiction A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul, the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills...read more

On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals―the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado―and to the darker side of life in a resort town.Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo's well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo's favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game's consequences may be all too real.Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño's papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own―and exploring for the first time the themes that would define his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Product Description: Bolano’s radical first novel makes its paperback debut as a New Directions Pearl.Written when he was only twenty-seven, Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Roberto Bolano’s fictional universe. This novel presents the genesis of Bolano’s enterprise in prose; all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes...read more

Product Description: Now in paperback ― the sole collection of the great Chilean writer’s essaysBetween Parentheses collects Roberto Bolano’s nonfiction: fiercely opinionated articles, speeches, essays, and talks, as well as most of the newspaper columns he wrote during the last five years of his life, when fame had come to him at last...read more

Product Description: On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town...read more

Chronicles the strange journey of two Latin American poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as seen through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa.

Product Description: Hailed as Roberto Bolaños highest achievement, 2666 takes place in a fictional town on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

Product Description: 'In Mario Vargas Llosa's latest novel there are two stories - that of Paul Gauguin, the Post-Impressionist painter, and that of Paul Gauguin's grandmother, Flora Tristan ...what makes the novel so illuminating is the continuity between their parallel lives ...read more

Surviving the deaths of his 1960s rock-star parents to become a famous children's author, Peter Hook recounts to a typecast child actor both his own past and the story of J. M. Barrie, lives marked by shadow identities, suicide, and lost boys.

A literary apprenticeship in eleven letters by the author of In Praise of the Stepmother draws on the works of international writers while revealing the author's own deep beliefs about writing, reading, and thought, identifying writers as creators and writing an act requiring disciplined development. Reprint. 15,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

A modern, episodic novel of Cuba follows Pedro Juan, an ex-radio journalist, as he struggles to survive in the crumbling old city of Havana. 12,500 first printing.