The Return: Stories

＂Dark, intimate and sneakily touching . . . There is gold to be found in [The Return].＂ --Michael Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review

Composed of thirteen indelible stories, Roberto Bolaño’s The Return is preoccupied with ghosts: troubled souls haunting society’s margins, lovers lost to the ages, young men who no longer recognize themselves in the mirror, fresh corpses afforded no peace, departed poets who visit us in dreams. These tales capture the extremes of human experience--sex, violence, death--and the mundane acts that linger in between, with Bolaño’s inimitable mordant humor and trenchant insight into what drives us. A master of the short form, Bolaño is as interested in the act of storytelling as he is in the stories themselves: how they nestle within one another; how they shift, spread, and scatter; and how they return to us again and again.

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, the Herralde de Novela 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.