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Best Translated Book 2008 Longlist: 2666 by Roberto Bolano

For the next several weeks we’ll be highlighting a book-a-day from the 25-title Best Translated Book of 2008 fiction longlist, leading up to the announcement of the 10 finalists. Click here for all previous write-ups. 2666 by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer. (Chile, FSG) What ...

New Quarterly Conversation

Issue 14 of The Quarterly Conversation is now available online and features a number of interesting articles and reviews. In terms of reviews, there’s a piece by Scott Esposito on 2666, and one by Scott Bryan Wilson of Attila Bartis’s Tranquility. The “Features” sound really interesting as well, ...

2666: The NY Times Review

On the same day as the 2666 Launch Party (which, thanks to the d-bags curators of myopenbar.com was crowded with non-literary folk [seriously, we should all prank them by submitting hundreds of fake events featuring free booze], although Zadie Smith, Natasha Wimmer, Michael Miller, Craig Teicher, Mark Binelli, and many more ...

2666: The Launch Party

I’m off to New York to make the rounds the next two days, and to log in a couple hours of tough “work” at Friday night’s 2666 launch party that’s taking place at Plan B (10th and B) from 8 to 10. I hear there will be some finished copies on sale, and a lot of people involved with the book (like ...

A Comment Worth Repeating

From Fausto in relation to the post about New Directions’s forthcoming Bolano books: “The best one of the lot is Antwerp. He never wrote that well before or after.” My Google searches for info on Antwerp are leading nowhere . . . well, actually they led me to this — Bolano’s astrology and birth ...

More Details on Future Bolano Books

In a post about Time Out New York‘s fall books preview, I referenced the forthcoming Roberto Bolano books that New Directions is bringing out over the next few years, but didn’t include many details. Thanks to the incredibly New Directions Newsletter the full list of upcoming Bolano is now ...

898 Pages Later . . .

2666 is a true masterpiece. I plan on writing something more substantial later, after taking some time to think about the novel, but in the meantime I want to share a couple interesting bits from the “Note to the First Edition” about Bolano’s notes on the novel: In one of his many notes for 2666, Bolano ...