8vo. pp. 164. bds. dw. [New York]: New Directions Book, [2010].
New.
Translated by Chris Andrews.
"A once-in-a-blue-moon rhapsodic reading experience" - Jonathan Lethem,
The New York Times
In addition to five brilliant new stories, The Insufferable Gaucho offers for the first time in English two essays by Roberto Bolano: "Literature + Illness = Illness" and "The Myth of Cthulhu." Provocative and often scathing, Bolano's Essays were described as "treasure, old glittering jewels and fistfuls of gold," by Marcela Valdes in The Nation: "In the essays, we hear Bolano's real voice, the one he often disguised through the ventriloquism of his fiction."
The stories in The Insufferable Gaucho ― unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire ― might concern a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly Argentine lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the familye state on the Pampas, now gone to wrack and ruin. These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.