Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

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New Directions Publishing, May 30, 2011 - Literary Collections - 390 pages

The essays of Roberto Bolano in English at last.

Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. “Taken together,” as the editor Ignacio Echevarría remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography.’” Bolano’s career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolano also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his “ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior”: he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels.”
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Fragments of a Return to the Native Land
47
january 1999april 2000
117
Springtime in Blanes
123
Civilization
129
Friends Are Strange
135
Blanes Christmas Story
141
The RapierSharp Pen of Rodrigo Rey Rosa
151
Beach
260
Vienna and the Shadow of a Woman
270
Our Guide to the Abyss
291
The Mad Inventors
303
The Brave Librarian
311
Two Novels by Mario Vargas Llosa
319
Notes on Jaime Bayly
325
A Stroll Through the Abyss
332

Javier Cercas Comes Home
164
Alphonse Daudet
177
Illustrated Notebooks
191
september 2002january 2003
211
Town Crier of Blanes
247
The Maritime Jungle
254
Who Would Dare?
343
Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories
350
Sources
371
Index
382
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolantilde;o (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed ldquo;by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long timerdquo; (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times ),rdquo; and as ldquo;the real thing and the rarestrdquo; (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de NovelaAward and the Premio Roacute;mulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.

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