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Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included here are some of Bolaño’s best. Whether they concern a stalwart rodent detective trying to investigate the mysterious deaths of his fellow rats, an elderly judge giving up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the pampas, or a confrontation between an elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he’s plagiarized for years, they are as haunting as they are enthralling. In addition, The Insufferable Gaucho offers, for the first time in English, two essays: ‘Literature + Illness = Illness’ and ‘The Myths of Cthulhu’. Provocative and often scathing, these essays are alive with Bolaño’s trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word. Roberto Bolaño confirmed his place as a giant of Latin American literature with his novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 . He is undoubtedly, as Susan Sontag said, ‘the real thing and the rarest’. The Insufferable Gaucho was the last book he prepared for publication before he died in 2003.
About the author
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He is now teaching at the University of Western Sydney, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating books by Roberto Bolaño and César Aira for New Directions, he has published a critical study (Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge, Rodopi, 1999) and a collection of poems (Cut Lunch, Indigo, 2002).
