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Book Summary and Reviews of Cowboy Graves by Roberto Bolaño

Cowboy Graves by Roberto Bolaño

Cowboy Graves

Three Novellas

by Roberto Bolaño

  • Critics' Consensus (11):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2021, 208 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolaño, an essential voice of contemporary Latin American literature.

Cowboy Graves is an unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. Roberto Bolaño's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is unmistakable in these three novellas. In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo Belano--Bolaño's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors," takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in the sky overhead.

These three fiercely original tales bear the signatures of Bolaño's extraordinary body of work, echoing the strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while deepening our reverence for his gifts.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A posthumous triad of novellas by Bolaño, postmodernist par excellence...Each story reveals a centrifugal writer with a brilliant command of words and no fear of a plot's getting away from him." - Kirkus Reviews

"While the loosely connected vignettes in each novella fail to fully cohere, they show a writer working to capture the fragility of identity and relationships in revolutionary settings. These drafts reveal Bolaño (1953–2003) perfecting the literary obsessions that became his emblems." - Publishers Weekly

"Bolaño's brilliant oeuvre expands with another bright starburst, this one comprising three separate yet thematically connected novellas...Bolaño's inimitable style and searing vision will appeal to fans and new readers alike." - Booklist

This information about Cowboy Graves was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. A poet and novelist, he has been acclaimed "by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time" (the Los Angeles Times), and as "the real thing and the rarest" (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. His books include The Savage Detectives, 2666, The Spirit of Science Fiction, By Night in Chile, Distant Star, Last Evenings on Earth, and The Romantic Dogs.

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