Cowboy Graves
Three fiercely original tales. An unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent.
Roberto Bolaño's boundless gift for shaping the chaos of reality into fiction is unmistakable across these three novellas. In ‘Cowboy Graves,’ Arturo Belano – Bolaño's alter ego – returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. ‘French Comedy of Horrors’ finds a seventeen-year-old recruited into a secret society of artists in the sewers of Paris. And in ‘Fatherland,’ a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence.
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER
‘His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction’ Sunday Times
‘Fascinating... A rare opportunity for the reader to witness the creation of a seemingly inexhaustible body of work’ El Pais
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.
Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her recent translations include Nona Fernández’s Voyager and Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death.