Antwerp - Paperback

by Roberto Bola?o (Author), Natasha Wimmer (Translator)

"It's hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bola?o . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving." --Nicole Krauss, The Guardian

Oft called the "big bang" of Roberto Bola?o's universe, Antwerp is his first novel--or the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bola?o drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bola?o's oeuvre.

Author Biography

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.

Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño's 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.