When I was checking out a random employee walked by, looked at my picks and said Iza’s Ballad is “amazing”. My Bolaño collection is increasingly filling out - I only have two novels left (Monsieur Pain and A Little Lumpen Novelita) before I start getting into posthumous ephemera. Meanwhile I’m now the proud owner of a full set of NYRB’s Magda Szabó’s English translations 😌

Great news for most, but bad news for Bolaño girlies who really like the new covers, have limited bookshelf space and have already gone all-in on a comprehensive collection of the New Directions paperbooks (cough me cough)

It's no secret that Bolaño is one of my very favorite writers, and I'm a huge recommend on his work. He's a unique and strange writer who steeps his work in a kind of comic darkness. As a Chilean writer-in-exile who fled his home after Pinochet's coup, he's very interested in the lasting legacy of 20th century fascism and political violence, as well as the experience of exile and of writers themselves, and frequently plays with autofiction through the use of his literary alter-ego, Arturo Belano. He crafted a literary universe full of interconnected themes and recurring characters that make his body of work especially rich to visit as a whole.

This first round of reissues is dropping on September 3rd with three books: By Night in Chile, The Return, and Antwerp.

Of the three, By Night in Chile is the standout, a novella-length monologue by a Chilean priest and literary critic, who on his death bed sweatily justifies his actions during the Pinochet regime. It's an angry cry against the Chilean literary establishment's reaction to Pinochet and an exploration of the dangers of prizing aesthetics over political substance. It was the first Bolaño published in America and served as a springboard for his reputation - the legendary Susan Sontag called it "the real thing...a contemporary novel destined to have a permanent place in World Literature"

The Return I'd say is more a piece for completionists. Bolaño was a master of short fiction - Pankaj Mishra said his short stories "do the work of a novel" and I agree, the amount of thematic resonance he can pack into 10 to 30 pages is incredible. An earlier collection, Last Evenings on Earth (getting reissued in 2026), was pulled from two spanish-language collections, and The Return consists of the leftovers. It's good, but it's weaker than the other collection, feeling a bit more like the stranger, darker B-sides. Worth a read, but not essential.

Then there's Antwerp, one of Bolaño's earliest novels but one not published until 2002. Some folks would stick this in the "completionists only" bucket but I loved it. A slim novella consisting of 56 short prose-poem chapters, it's strange and fragmentary and dreamlike in a way that feels in kinship with the more surrealist films of David Lynch.

Anyways once again - I love Bolaño and am a huge recommend on his work. This feels like a great time for unfamiliar folks to start reading him!

To be honest I'm still digesting - this is a huge, massive, sprawling book in five mostly-disparate parts. It's hard to track something this large and I sometimes found myself frustrated, lost in the weeds and unsure how I felt about what I was reading.

Now that I've finished it and can see the shape of the entire thing, I think it's brilliant and a fitting capper for Bolaño's career. I'm still digesting and will be for a while, but it's so clearly the work of a dying man who knew he didn't have much time left. In many ways it's 900 pages of Bolaño grappling with his own mortality, his ever-bleakening view of and relationship with the world around him, his legacy as an author and the relationship between art and artist. It's the terminus of a life and body of work preoccupied with art and violence and exile and the lasting wounds of 20th century fascism and political violence.

The last 3 pages in particular hit me like a gut punch. Like "I Can't Give Everything Away", the final track off Bowie's Blackstar, it feels like a final goodbye, the last words of an artist I love as he signs off one final time. RIP Roberto, you are greatly missed ❤️