Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

By Roberto Bolaño

Book Overview

Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bola o wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. "Taken together," as the editor Ignacio Echevarr a remarks in his introduction, they provide "a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented 'autobiography.'" Bola o's career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bola o also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cort zar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his "ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior" he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: "I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811218147
• ISBN13: 9780811218146
• Release Date: May 2011
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.7" x 8.1"