A Little Lumpen Novelita

＂An exemplary literary rebel.＂ --Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books

＂[Bolaño] demonstrates . . . what is possible in fiction--which is to say, anything.＂ --William Deresiewicz, The New Republic

Now I’m a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime. So begins the story of Bianca, whom a car crash has overnight left an orphan and, only a teenager herself, a caregiver to her younger brother. Abandoned by social services, the siblings drop out of school, attempt to survive on their late father’s meager pension, and lie around their family home in an apathetic stupor. Things take a turn for the bizarre when Bianca’s brother brings home from the gym a pair of dubiously intentioned strangers, who move in and make themselves the odd bedfellows of the siblings. When the housemates devise a scheme to escape their indigence--one that involves a blind, aging former bodybuilder, an eerie old house, a fabled fortune locked in a safe, and Bianca’s powers of seduction--she finds herself in a moral haze, forced to consider whether the act that could beget her future may also be her undoing. Taut, tense, and tragicomic, Roberto Bolaño’s A Little Lumpen Novelita tells a tale of dispossession, dreams, and the blurred line between fate and fortune.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was the author of The Savage Detectives and 2666, among many other notable works. Born in Santiago, Chile, he later lived in Mexico City, Paris, and Barcelona. His accolades include the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He died at the age of fifty and is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation.

Natasha Wimmer is a translator of contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction. She is a regular visiting lecturer at Princeton University and Columbia University and she has written reviews and criticism for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.