Roberto Bolaño

Chris Andrews

In a deathbed confession, Father Urrutia, a Jesual priest and conservative literary critic, shares his memories of his work with agents of Opus Dei and his secret job of instructing Pinochet about Marxism to the Chilean junta generals can understand their enemy. Original.

By Night in Chile

César Aira

"My story, the story of 'how I became a nun,' began very early in my life; I had just turned six. The beginning is marked by a vivid memory, which I can reconstruct down to the last detail. Before, there is nothing, and after, everything is an extension of the same vivid memory, continuous and unbroken, including the intervals of sleep, up to the point where I took the veil ." So starts Cesar Aira's astounding "autobiographical" novel. Intense and perfect, this invented narrative of childhood experience bristles with dramatic humor at each stage of growing up: a first ice cream, school, reading, games, friendship. The novel begins in Aira's hometown, Coronel Pringles. As self-awareness grows, the story rushes forward in a torrent of anecdotes which transform a world of uneventful happiness into something else: the anecdote becomes adventure, and adventure, fable, and then legend. Between memory and oblivion, reality and fiction, Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun retains childhood's main treasures: the reality of fable and the delirium of invention.

A few days after his fiftieth birthday, Aira noticed the thin rim of the moon, visible despite the rising sun. When his wife explained the phenomenon to him he was shocked that for fifty years he had known nothing about "something so obvious, so visible." This epiphany led him to write How I Became a Nun. With a subtle and melancholic sense of humor he reflects on his failures, on the meaning of life, and the importance of literature.

How I Became a Nun

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in , one of the remarkable qualities of Bolano’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bolano story might concern an elusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bolano’s stories have been applauded as “bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated” () and “complex and provocative” (), and as Francine Prose said in , “something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.” Two fascinating essays are also included.

The Insufferable Gaucho

Cesar Aira

A collection of twenty short stories features tales about oddballs, freaks, and crazy people.

And Other Stories

The Musical Brain

A middle-class, directionless ox of a young man who helps the trash pickers of Buenos Aires's shantytown attracts the attention of a corrupt policeman who would use anyone including innocent kids to break a drug ring he believes is operating in the slum. By the author of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. Original.

Shantytown

A bureaucrat from Panama with no artistic history or inclinations writes the masterwork of modern Central American poetry.

Varamo

After he accepts a bribe not to treat chronically hiccupping Peruvian poet César Vallejo, mesmerist Monsieur Pierre Pain is racked with guilt but is barred from the hospital when he tries to do the right thing, only to discover a rival mesmerist has entered the picture, along with an assassination and a host of other nightmares. By the acclaimed author of 2666.

Monsieur Pain

A new collection of short fiction gathers everything the author was working on before his death, including a story about a North American journalist receiving a mysterious call in Paris and a woman's recounting of the loss of her virginity. By the author of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666.

The Secret of Evil

Kaouther Adimi

Bookshop in Algiers

Ted Dekker

Immanuel's Veins

Then One Year...

Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has achieved critical and popular acclaim rarely enjoyed by contemporary literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a critic and scholar who has translated many of Bolano's works into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre and incorporates his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction. He provides new readings and interpretations of 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile and explores aspects of Bolano's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. In Andrews's lucid and innovative readings, Bolano emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness.

An Expanding Universe

Roberto Bolaño's Fiction

A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.") Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolano."

Distant Star

Liliana Colanzi

You Glow in the Dark

Suitable for higher ability students at KS3 stage, this is a companion teachers resources pack. Covering the core areas of KS3 Curriculum, it includes colour source cards that contain many activities. It also features reproductions of sources, including documents, paintings and photographs that are useful alongside departmental resources.

Teacher's Resource Pack for Higher Ability Students

Medieval Realms, 1066-1500

Matt McGuire

This book brings together a variety of perspectives to explore the role of literature in the aftermath of political conflict, studying the ways in which writers approach violent conflict and the equally important subject of peace. Essays put insights from Peace and Conflict Studies into dialog with the unique ways in which literature attempts to understand the past, and to reimagine both the present and the future, exploring concepts like truth and reconciliation, post-traumatic memory, historical reckoning, therapeutic storytelling, transitional justice, archival memory, and questions about victimhood and reparation. Drawing on a range of literary texts and addressing a variety of post-conflict societies, this volume charts and explores the ways in which literature attempts to depict and make sense of this new philosophical terrain. As such, it aims to offer a self-conscious examination of literature, and the discipline of literary studies, considering the ability of both to interrogate and explore the legacies of political and civil conflict around the world. The book focuses on the experience of post-Apartheid South Africa, post-Troubles Northern Ireland, and post-dictatorship Latin America. The recent history of these regions, and in particular their acute experience of ethno-religious and civil conflict, make them highly productive contexts in which to begin examining the role of literature in the aftermath of social trauma. Rather than a definitive account of the subject, the collection defines a new field for literary studies, and opens it up to scholars working in other regional and national contexts. To this end, the book includes essays on post-1989 Germany, post-9/11 United States, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Sierra Leone, and narratives of asylum seeker/refugee communities. This volume’s comparative frame draws on well-established precedents for thinking about the cultural politics of these regions, making it a valuable resource for scholars of Comparative Literature, Peace and Conflicts Studies, Human Rights, Transitional Justice, and the Politics of Literature.

Human Rights, Peace, Justice

Post-Conflict Literature

An Insider's History of Electronic Publishing

The Education of a CD-ROM Publisher

Providing many activities suitable for students of different abilities, this is a companion pack of teacher's resources, along with colour source cards. It includes upto 20 topics with single page and mini-project activities in each. It also includes documents, paintings and photographs that are useful alongside departmental resources.

Lower ability pack

Medieval Realms

David Huelin

Sark a Photographic Guide

Then One Day... describes the colorful scene of legal sports books in the memoir of Chris Andrews, who built a Las Vegas career out of sports betting.

Chris Andrews

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