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The Insufferable Gaucho
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  • Published: 7 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529983166
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00
Categories:

The Insufferable Gaucho

Formats & editions
EBook
5 Sept 2024
Audiobook
7 Oct 2025
Paperback
3 Dec 2024
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A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño’s work – now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time.

‘If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear...’

A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he's plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation.

Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolaño's best. In addition, two essays are included: provocative and often scathing, they too are alive with Bolaño's trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word.

TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS

‘An exemplary literary rebel’ New York Review of Books

‘A master of the short form’ Independent

‘Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own’ New York Times
  • Published: 7 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529983166
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00
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.
RBñ

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 The Insufferable Gaucho

A spellbinder

Newseek

Roberto Bolaño was a game changer: his field was politics, poetry and melancholia . . . and his writing was always unparalleled

Mariana Enríquez

We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius

Patti Smith

Roberto Bolaño’s work is a sprawling labyrinth of surprise, bold invention, and images that will live with you forever

Chris Power

Roberto Bolaño was a flat-out genius, one of the greatest writers of our time.

Paul Auster

The triumphant posthumous entrance of Roberto Bolaño into the English-language literary firmament has been one of the sensations of the decade

Sunday Times

Bolaño's voice demands attention

The New Yorker

It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño.

Guardian