Last Evenings on Earth

Author

Roberto Bolaño

Original Works

Killer Whores·Phone Calls

Translator

Chris Andrews

Format

Collection / Anthology

Language

English

Year

2006

Publisher

New Directions

Country

United States

Pages

219

ISBN

9780811216340

0000

Wikipedia — about this translation ↗

Last Evenings on Earth is a collection of short stories by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, published in 1997 with a translation into English by Chris Andrews published in 2006. The stories in this volume were selected from two Spanish-language collections, Llamadas Telefonicas (1997) and Putas Asesinas (2001). The remaining stories in these two collections were later gathered in The Return.— Wikipedia — this translation

"The melancholy folklore of exile," as Roberto Bolaño once put it, pervades these fourteen haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime. These protagonists tend to take detours and to narrate unresolved efforts. They are characters living in the margins, often coming to pieces, and sometimes, as in a nightmare, in constant flight from something horrid. In the short story "Silva the Eye," Bolaño writes in the opening sentence: "It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as The Eye, always tried to escape violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around 20 years old when Salvador Allende died." Set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe, and peopled by Bolaño's beloved "failed generation," the stories of Last Evenings on Earth have appeared in The New Yorker and Grand Street.— Google Books