Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño's Fiction and Poetry examines the ways in which Bolaño employs a type of literary aesthetics that subverts traits traditionally associated with postmodernism. Pastén B. coins these aesthetics "postmodernism of resistance" and argues that this resistance stands in direct opposition to critical discourses that construe the presence of hopeless characters and marginal settings in Bolaño's works as signs of the writer's disillusionment with the political as a consequence of the defeat of the Left in Latin America. Rather, he contends, Bolaño creates a fictional world comprised of characters and situations that paradoxically refuse to accept defeat--even while displaying the scars of terrible historical events. In this work Pastén B. challenges some critical assumptions about Bolaño's fiction and poetry that led to decontextualized interpretations of his work and offers a singularly comprehensive investigation that synthesizes multiple perspectives of a complicated author into one text.

Postmodernism of Resistance in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction and Poetry examines the ways in which Bolaño employs a type of literary aesthetics that subverts traits traditionally associated with postmodernism. Pastén B. coins these aesthetics “postmodernism of resistance” and argues that this resistance stands in direct opposition to critical discourses that construe the presence of hopeless characters and marginal settings in Bolaño’s works as signs of the writer’s disillusionment with the political as a consequence of the defeat of the Left in Latin America. Rather, he contends, Bolaño creates a fictional world comprised of characters and situations that paradoxically refuse to accept defeat—even while displaying the scars of terrible historical events. In this work Pastén B. challenges some critical assumptions about Bolaño’s fiction and poetry that led to decontextualized interpretations of his work and offers a singularly comprehensive investigation that synthesizes multiple perspectives of a complicated author into one text.

The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.

Stories of the "failed generation" set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe.

“It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving.” —Nicole Krauss, The Guardian Oft called the “big bang” of Roberto Bolaño’s universe, Antwerp is his first novel—or the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.

In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

Roberto Bolaño as World Literature provides an introduction to the Chilean novelist that highlights his connections with classic and contemporary masters of world literature and his investigation of topics of international interest, such as the rise of rightwing and neofascist movements during the last decades of the 20th century. But this anthology also shows how Roberto Bolaño's participation in world literature is informed in his experiences, identity, and, more generally, cultural location as a Chilean, Latin American and, more generally, Hispanic writer and man. This book provides a corrective to readings of his novels as exclusively "postmodern" or as unproblematically representative of Chilean or Latin American reality. Roberto Bolaño as World Literature thus helps readers to better understand such complex works as his monumental global five-part masterpiece 2666, his Chilean novels (Distant Star, By Night in Chile), and his Mexican narratives (Amulet, The Savage Detectives), among other works.

The essays collected in both volumes of Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950 move away from esoteric literary criticism toward a more evaluative and speculative inquiry that will serve as the basis from which poets will be discussed and taught over the next half-century and beyond.

Alejandro Zambra's Ways of Going Home begins with an earthquake, seen through the eyes of an unnamed nine-year-old boy who lives in an undistinguished middleclass housing development in a suburb of Santiago, Chile. When the neighbors camp out overnight, the protagonist gets his first glimpse of Claudia, an older girl who asks him to spy on her uncle Raúl. In the second section, the protagonist is the writer of the story begun in the first section. His father is a man of few words who claims to be apolitical but who quietly sympathized—to what degree, the author isn't sure—with the Pinochet regime. His reflections on the progress of the novel and on his own life—which is strikingly similar to the life of his novel's protagonist—expose the raw suture of fiction and reality. Ways of Going Home switches between author and character, past and present, reflecting with melancholy and rage on the history of a nation and on a generation born too late—the generation which, as the author-narrator puts it, learned to read and write while their parents became accomplices or victims. It is the most personal novel to date from Zambra, the most important Chilean author since Roberto Bolaño.