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“... Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago de Chile in 1953, moved with his family to Mexico City at the age of 15, and was inspired by the election of Salvador Allende to return to his native country five years later. In his short story ‘Dance Card’, which accords with the known facts of his life and does not present itself as fiction, Bolaño indicates that he hardly distinguished as a young man – if he ever did – between his politics and his love of poetry: ‘I reached Chile in August 1973 ...”

“... Roberto Bolaño likes to prolong his jokes well past the moment when even the slowest reader has got the point. Nazi Literature in the Americas, for example, looks like a single gag – the brief deadpan biography of an imaginary Fascist or near Fascist writer – multiplied by 30-odd cases over 200 pages. But then it dawns on even the slowest reader that what looked like the point wasn’t the point; and that the jokes were not only jokes ...”

“... player until he quit and started smoking rollies. As an undergraduate he wrote a book on Roberto Bolaño and the Juárez femicides chronicled in 2666. He attempted to walk across the United States, giving up somewhere short of California – the subject of the ‘Walk Book’ (‘167k words’) which he’s shopping to a former classmate who’s ...”

“... Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders’, an absurdist recitation pitched somewhere between Roberto Bolaño and Chris Morris, was dreamed up for radio in 1988) but later addressing his displaced existence. The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002) made him something more than a name to watch, and since then he’s had his share of ...”

“... adults who understood, as their children did not, the kind of country they were living in. Unlike Roberto Bolaño, a young adult at the time of the coup, or José Donoso, then at the height of his fame, these writers didn’t experience military rule as a rupture with the past but as the unremarkable norm. This has resulted in a very specific strain of ...”

“... collections of short stories. He appears as a character called Sensini in a story of that name by Roberto Bolaño, collected in a volume appropriately titled Last Evenings on Earth (2007). The books under review give English-speaking readers a good chance to catch up – an ideal chance, we could say, since both works are very well translated and display ...”

“... with bibliographical exactness: it continues in the fictions of Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams, Roberto Bolaño and Mark Z. Danielewski, among many others. The Polish science fiction writer and author of Solaris, Stanisław Lem, wrote long introductions to four imaginary books in Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and a whole volume of reviews of non-existent ...”

“... to a story in which everyone suffers terribly and/or dies. That the other blurbs come from Roberto Bolaño, Susan Sontag and Paul Auster indicates that Kleist at last achieved the fame he longed for in his lifetime. In 2013, there was even a big budget film version – Age of Uprising – starring Mads Mikkelsen at his most weatherbeaten. This is ...”

“... the Cercas figure is researching a historical incident with help from his friend Roberto Bolaño – this played with the line between fact and fiction as a way of getting around the difficulties that stood between Spanish novelists and the story of the Civil War. Those difficulties were partly to do with a need not to be obvious, or not ...”

“... and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and become a literary sensation, on the order of Roberto Bolaño or Elena Ferrante (both also somewhat autobiographical, it should be added). So the more satisfactory response would be to take a poll (preferably worldwide) and find out what its readers think. I believe the result would be that they cannot ...”

“... of PM, his photo will be replaced by photos of other corpses. ‘What drives people crazy,’ Roberto Alvarez Gutiérez, a municipal police officer, explains, ‘is that there’s no follow-up. The files pile up and nothing is resolved. Sometimes mothers have to carry out their own investigations.’ That’s how things go here; it’s the norm. Every day ...”

“... any approach that isn’t politically engaged. Chile’s one great contemporary writer, Roberto Bolaño, who died in 2003, stayed away after the end of the dictatorship. It is the business of a younger generation to find the idiom for a modern Chilean culture; I heard of uptown kids rapping over the music of the revolutionary icon Violeta ...”

“... that nestling in her book bag are authors such as W.G. Sebald, César Aira, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Enrique Vila-Matas and others, writers who purposively smudge the line between memoir and fiction? M Train, with its dot-dash series of woozy photographs, even looks like a Sebald text, and I got the same queasy feeling from it that I’ve ...”

“... a contact number but she’d used her cellphone to film the fracas and it had been confiscated. In Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, a TV talk-show host watches enviously as a rival on Tijuana TV interviews a doomed cross-border veteran who holds ‘the record for most expulsions from the United States’: he is a scapegoat for the failures of the Mexican ...”