Roberto Bolaño Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of The Last Interview Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Roberto Bolano was a Chilean author, poet, essayist and short story writer. He passed away July 15, 2003.

Born on April 28, 1953, his work has been translated into a variety of languages. He had over three dozen publishing contracts in ten different countries at the time of his death, a list that grew after his death. He is largely considered to be one of the best Latin American writers of the 20th century.

He won the Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1999 for his novel The Savage Detectives. He was awarded posthumously the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2008 for his novel 2666.

The author was born to parents who were a truck driver and teacher. He grew up in coastal and southern Chile along with his sister, and had his own issues to contend with as a child. He was inclined towards books, skinny, near-sighted, dyslexic, and often was an outsider at school, where he was bullied. Their family were lower middle class and his first job was at ten years old selling bus tickets.

In 1968, his family decided to move to Mexico City. Once there, Roberto decided that it was time to drop out of school and work as a journalist. He also become more active in political causes on the left-wing side.

The author would leave Mexico to go to Chile to help the revolution and support Salvador Allende’s government. He was arrested and accused of being a terrorist, but thankfully got out of the situation due to the luck of two classmates from his past who had become prison guards. He expected to be tortured but could hear others being tortured. However, the story has since been called into questions by some friends from that era who doubt whether he was in Chile at this time.

Roberto returned to Mexico from Chile in 1974. The author lived as a bohemian poet. He then moved to Europe in 1977 and then eventually found his way to Spain. There he got married and settled down near Barcelona on the coast, where he paid his way by working in various positions as a campground custodian, a dishwasher, garbage collector, and bellhop. He would use extra time available to write.

Roberto also continued writing poetry and then in his early forties pursued fiction. He began to write fiction because he felt responsible for the well-being of his family. This was the true reason that he left the beatnik life of a poet behind, feeling it would be easier to earn money writing fiction. Despite this, the author still conceived of himself as a poet and a collection titled The Romantic Dogs which covered twenty years was released in 2000.

He died in 2003 after his health was declining, going through liver failure and being third on the list when he passed. His novelist friends got together and praised him as the most important figure of his generation in Seville at a conference he attended. Many of his close friends where there to give him tribute. The author officially passed due to live failure on July 15, 2003. He was survived by his wife, Carolina Lopez, and their two children.

When the author passed, he had a lot of work that had not yet made it to the public. A number of unpublished novels were discovered among his papers in 2009.

By Night in Chile is a novel written by Roberto Bolano. It is the rantings of the poet and priest Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix. He is approached by two Opus Dei agents at a point in his career. They tell him that he’s been picked to go to Europe to study how old churches are preserved. This is a great job for a cleric who is inclined towards the arts.

Once he gets there, he is informed that pigeon droppings are a major threat to the European cathedrals. His counterparts in the Old World have come up with an answer to this problem by becoming falconers. He goes town to town and sees the hawks get rid of birds there.

Not protesting this way of preserving the buildings shows his employers that he will be a good accomplice tot he brutal, predatory methods of the Pinochet regime. This is the start of using art to portray certain themes for the author, such as the intellectual man who uses aestheticism and art as a shield while the world around him remains cruel and unjust. The book was originally intended to be titled ‘Tormenta de Mierda’, although friends convinced him to change the title.

Read this book and follow along with Father Sebastian as the Chilean priest and Opus Dei member goes through some of the most important events in his life.

Distant Star is a novella written by Roberto Bolano. It is set in the Pinochet regime’s politics, and deals with photography, murder, and poetry, and can be described as a ‘dark satirical work’.

This is the story of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, a pilot in the air force. He uses the 1973 coup to launch a multi-media enterprise referred to as New Chilean Poetry, which features torture, poetry, sky-writing, and photo exhibitions.

The narrator of the story first meets this person in a college poetry workshop. Ruiz-Tagle becomes to them the shadow operator behind every act done in Pinochet’s regime. The narrator tries to track him down after seeing signs of what he is doing everywhere.

Corrosive, intelligent, mocking and humorous, this is an engaging story that blends fiction with the real-life events that went down during the early years of the Pinochet rule, from abductions to murder and more.

There have been many who have written about this time period, particularly Chilean authors. As Richard Eder said in The New York Times, no one has done it in such ‘a dark and glittering fashion’ as this author. Read this book to absorb all of the story for yourself and get a better sense of what that world was like at that time.