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Between Parentheses
Roberto Bolaño
  • Published: 5 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529924428
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

Between Parentheses

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

'Between Parentheses is a treasure chest' - The Nation

Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano 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 Echevarría 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.'\"

Bolano'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, Bolano also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, 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.\"
  • Published: 5 November 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529924428
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400
Categories:

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.
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Also by Roberto Bolaño

The Collected Short Stories of Roberto Bolaño
Woes of the True Policeman
The Collected Poems of Roberto Bolaño
Cowboy Graves
A Little Lumpen Novelita
Monsieur Pain
Amulet
See all

Praise for Between Parentheses

The excellent thing about Between Parentheses is how thoroughly it dispels any incenses or stale reverence in the air. It's a loud, greasy, unkeppt thing. Reading it is not like sitting through an air-conditioned seminar with the distinguished Senor Bolano. It's like sitting on a barstool next to him, the jukebox playing dirty flamenco.

The New York Times

Bolaño frolics in pithy essays on friendship, women, ancestors, and courage. He's irreverent and purposeful, cerebral and casual, insouciantly opinionated and ironic, and charming and funny.

Booklist

Bolano's judgments are a joy to read. Between Parentheses is a treasure chest: filled with odd glittering jewels and fistfuls of gold. In these essays we hear Bolano's real voice, the one he often disguised through the ventriloquism of his fiction.

The Nation

One emerges from Between Parentheses with the desire to read more -- to read more Bolano, re-read Borges, to discover Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn and Carmen Boullosa.

Zyzzyva

The essays in Between Parentheses preserve for us the voice of the seasoned and accomplished Bolano, the man who, as he was whipping up these various tapas, was also tending the large pot simmering with the eventual 2666, and was very likely aware that his days were numbered. I would like to have the culture, the knowledge, that would let me enjoy his responses to his fellow writers as they were meant to be enjoyed, but even without that--and it is a considerable deficit--the collection delights. How not? Spirit, where it exists, shines through. Roberto Bolano was one of the ones for whom literature was everything.

Aysmptote

What a refreshing surprise it is to hear Bolaño in his own words.

Time Out Chicago