Antwerp

Roberto Bolaño

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A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño’s work – now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time.

Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing.

A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world – but every door opens onto a nightmare.

An experimental novella, spliced together in vignettes, Antwerp is Roberto Bolaño’s first work of fiction. A personal declaration of the power of literature, to read it is to be present at ‘the big bang’ of Bolaño’s enterprise into prose, to see the beginning, to witness the moment when his talent explodes.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

'A fascinating, even compulsory addition to the Bolaño fan’s bookshelf' Daily Telegraph

‘Bolaño set a new speed limit for literature. He simply wrote past other authors... His books are volcanic, perilous, charged with infectious erotic energy and demonic lucidity’ Benjamín Labatut, author of The Maniac

Published: 7 October 2025
ISBN: 9781529983395
Imprint: Vintage Digital
Format: Audio Download
RRP: $28.00

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Translated works

About the author

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealism poetry movement. Described by the New York Times as ‘the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation’, he was the author of over twenty works, including The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998, and 2666, which posthumously won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty, just as his writing found global recognition.