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  • Published: 3 December 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784879563
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

Woes of the True Policeman



A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño’s work – now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time.

When Oscar Amalfitano begins an affair with one of his students, he has no idea where it will lead.

More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change him for ever. Forced to flee Barcelona with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amalfitano finds himself in Santa Teresa, a sprawling, mythical town on the Mexico-US border, populated by mysterious characters and haunted by dark tales of murdered women.

Returning to the the world and characters of 2666, Bolaño's masterpiece, Woes of the True Policeman explores the the power of art, memory and desire - and marks a kaleidoscopic, lyrical and darkly humorous last act in one of the great oeuvres of world literature.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

‘Hallucinatory, manic, fearful, comic... Bolaño must be read by anyone who loves the novel’ Herald

‘We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius’ Patti Smith

  • Published: 3 December 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784879563
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.

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Praise for Woes of the True Policeman

It’s no exaggeration to call Bolaño a genius

Washington Post

Bolaño makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world

Guardian

Bolaño's voice demands attention.

The New Yorker

The most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation.

The New York Times Book Review

An event of language and devilish wit

Wall Street Journal

There is a power in these pages that very few writers ever achieve

Scotsman

Roberto Bolaño mastered the alchemy of turning the trivial into the sublime, the everyday into adventure. Bolaño is among the best at this diabolical skill.

Georgi Gospodinov

When I read Bolaño, I think: everything is possible again

Nicole Krauss