The Insufferable Gaucho

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.