A Little Lumpen Novelita - Hardcover

Bolaño, Roberto

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811223353 ISBN 13: 9780811223355

Publisher: New Directions, 2014

Synopsis

A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women.

“Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime”: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita.

Orphaned overnight as a teenager―“our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us”―she drops out of school and gets a crappy job. At night, she is plagued by a terrible brightness, and soon she drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can fall even lower...

Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita―one of the last novels Roberto Bolano published―delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of taking control of one’s fate.

About this title

About the Author:

Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed “by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),” and as “the real thing and the rarest” (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.

Natasha Wimmer’s translation of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 won the National Book Award’s Best Novel of the Year as well as the PEN Prize.

Review:

“One of the best books of the year–A Little Lumpen Novelita feels as substantial as a book three times as long. This is a glittering gem, as maddening and haunting as you'd expect from Bolano.”
- Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

“As for Bolano, what can one say? One of our greatest writers, a straight colossus.”
- Junot Diaz

“Bolano has proven that literature can do everything.”
- Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times

“Bolano has joined the immortals.”
- The Washington Post

“The very highest level of literary achievement.”
- Colm Tóbín

“Roberto Bolano was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown, he had to go there himself, and there invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results were multi-dimensional.”
- Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books

“Electrifying.”
- Time

“Gritty, compelling, profound.”
- The Philadelphia Inquirer

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0811223353
• ISBN 13: 9780811223355
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128