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''This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature...'' A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protege in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. A litany unfolds, offering sixty-nine reasons why not to dance with Pablo Neruda. ''The melancholy folklore of exile,'' as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades the fourteen haunting stories of Last Evenings on Earth . Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolano''s beloved ''failed generation,'' this collection was the first to introduce the English-speaking world to Bolano''s immeasurable gifts as a short-story writer. TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS ''May be the most haunting and mesmerising collection I have ever read'' Daily Telegraph ''It is a shame that Bolano has no more evenings on earth, his unique voice asserting the importance and exuberance of literature will be sorely missed'' Guardian
About the author
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.Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He teaches in the department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies of the University of Melbourne. His translation of Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star in 2005 won the prestigious Valle-Inclán Prize.
