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  • Published: 3 December 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784879549
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $26.00
Categories:

The Spirit of Science Fiction





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

Two young poets, Jan and Remo, find themselves adrift in Mexico City.

Obsessed with poetry, and, above all, with science fiction, they are eager to forge a life in the literary world. But as close as these friends are, the city tugs them in opposite directions.

Jan withdraws from the world, shutting himself in their shared rooftop apartment where he feverishly composes fan letters to the stars of science fiction. Meanwhile, Remo runs head-first into the future, spending his days and nights with a circle of wild young writers, seeking pleasure in the city’s labyrinthine streets, rundown cafes, and murky bathhouses.

TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER

‘Fascinating... Achingly beautiful... It reads like a dispatch from beyond the grave’ New Yorker

‘The Spirit of Science Fiction functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño’s fictions... A cocktail of sorrow and ecstasy’ Paris Review

  • Published: 3 December 2024
  • ISBN: 9781784879549
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $26.00
Categories:

About the author

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, and died in 2003 in Spain. He is widely regarded as one of the foremost Latin American novelists of his generation and his work has won him numerous literary prizes.

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Praise for The Spirit of Science Fiction

A gem-choked puzzle of a book

New York Times

The novel is dappled with recognizably Bolañan pleasures

Paris Review

Irresistible.

Telegraph

[A]n entertaining, lyrical and accomplished novel.

Wall Street Journal

Bolaño is the writer who opened a new vein for 21st Century literature... Vivacious and weird and madly alive again.

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

Roberto Bolaño continues to cast a spell

Roberto Bolaño’s books are volcanic, perilous, charged with infectious erotic energy and demonic lucidity

Benjamín Labatut