Four years after his death from liver failure, Roberto Bolano burst into the English-speaking literary world with the 2007 translation of his sprawling tour de force, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. In 2008 came the translation of his posthumously published epic, 2666, which he wrote feverishly up until his death, and which exceeds even THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES in the ambition, scope, and complexity of its narrative structure. Made of up five interlocking novellas, 2666's plot swirls around a mysterious German novelist, Benno von Archimboldi, and his connection to a series of gruesome murders in an impoverished Mexican town. As poets and critics collide with boxers and Black Panthers in the desolation of the Sonora Desert, Bolano shows his rare ability to blend the literary puzzle-boxes of Borges--Bolano's literary hero--with gritty and quixotic adventure and crime stories. 2666 takes the kaleidoscopic insanity of contemporary literature and culture, and applies it to the globalized world--the result is a 21st-century masterpiece in the tradition of Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE or David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST. The New York Times Book Review selected 2666 as one of its 10 Best Books of 2008.

A posthumous masterwork by a prize-winning founder of the infrarealist poetry movement finds such characters as an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interacting in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared. Simultaneous.

A posthumous masterwork by a prize-winning founder of the infrarealist poetry movement finds such characters as an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student interacting in an urban community on the U.S.-Mexico border where hundreds of young factory workers have disappeared. Simultaneous.