The Insufferable Gaucho

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities ofBola?o’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” The InsufferableGaucho contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bola?o story might concern anelusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable returnto the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bola?o’s stories have been applauded as “bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated” (Publishers Weekly) and“complex and provocative” (International Herald Tribune), and as Francine Prosesaid in The New York Times Book Review, “something extraordinarily beautifuland (at least to me) entirely new.” Two fascinating essays are also included.

"I was born in 1953, the year that Stalin and Dylan Thomas died," Roberto Bolano remarked, and "though I've lived in Europe for more than twenty years, my only nationality is Chilean, which in no way prevents me from feeling deeply Spanish and Latin American." Bolano has been hailed as "a spellbinder" (Newsweek), "never less than mesmerizing" (The Los Angeles Times), and "an exemplary literary rebel" (The New York Review of Books). In addition to the dozen books New Directions has already published, Between Parentheses, a volume of his essays, and a posthumous collection, The Secret of Evil, as well as two volumes of poetry are forthcoming.
Chris Andrews is a poet who lives and teaches in Australia. He has won the TLS Valle-Inclan Prize and a PEN Translation Award for his New Directions translations of Roberto Bolano.