Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

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This volume collects most of the newspaper columns and articles that Roberto Bolaño published between 1998 and 2003. Also included are a few scattered prefaces, as well as the texts of some talks or speeches given by Bolaño during the same period. Taken together, they make up a surprisingly rounded whole, offering in their entirety a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented “autobiography.”

The starting date, 1998, isn’t arbitrary. Up until then (and despite the critical success of Nazi Literature in the Americas and Distant Star, in 1996, and the short-story collection Llamadas telefónicas [Phone Calls], in 1997), Roberto was a little-known writer who lived in relative isolation in Blanes, a coastal town in the Spanish province of Gerona, north of Barcelona. It was after the publication of The Savage Detectives, in 1998, and the powerful response the novel elicited, that Roberto was given the opportunity to write for various Spanish and Latin American publications, and he began to be called upon to give lectures, write prefaces, preside at book launches, and participate in conferences.

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