The Insufferable Gaucho (New Directions Books)

A trove of strange, arresting, short masterworks five stories and two essays by Roberto Bolano, a writer who pulls bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolano s short stories is that they can do the work of a novel. The Insufferable Gaucho contains tales bent on returning to haunt you. Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire, a Bolano story might concern an elusive plagiarist or an elderly lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. Bolano s stories have been applauded as bleakly luminous and perfectly calibrated (Publishers Weekly) and complex and provocative (International Herald Tribune), and as Francine Prose said in The New York Times Book Review, something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new. Two fascinating essays are also included.