One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature 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... continue
A marathon game of dominoes, lasting from early morning to dusk, and involving four men for whom the game is a trigger for social, political and sexual rivalries against a background of colonial unrest. A complacent bailiff and his feckless taxi-driver partner are deserted by their wives for a mixture of personal and idealistic reasons, and the resulting turmoil leads on to murder and suicide as the tensions work themselves out. As well as being a novel of character, Double Play offers a powerful picture of colonial and attitudes in the mid-twentieth century.
Condemned for a murder he had not committed, Henri Charriere (nicknamed Papillon) was sent to the penal colony of French Guiana. Forty-two days after his arrival he made his first break, travelling a thousand gruelling miles in an open boat. Recaptured, he suffered a solitary confinement and was sent eventually to Devil's Island, a hell-hole of disease and brutality. No one had ever escaped from this notorious prison - no one until Papillon took to the shark infested sea supported only by a makeshift coconut-sack raft. In thirteen years he made nine daring escapes, living through many fantasti... continue