Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas
Roberto Bolaño, Natasha Wimmer (translation)Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas.
In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo Belano--Bolaño's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors" takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone & finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence & a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead. These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters & uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.
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Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile & Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His 1st full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize & the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. His other books include 2666, Last Evenings on Earth, & By Night in Chile. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at age 50.