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Roberto Bola¤o has attained an almost mythical stature and is often considered the most influential Latin American writer of his generation. The first English-language volume of essays on the Chilean author, Roberto Bola¤o, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, includes ten critical essays of his oeuvre. With a special emphasis on his masterpieces: 2666, The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, and Distant Star, the essays address topics such as Borges´s influence and the role of repetition, social memory, allegory, and neoliberalism.

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Introduction; Ignacio López-Calvo. Preface: On Roberto Bola¤o; Siddhartha Deb. PART I: GENERAL OVERVIEWS 1. Writing with The Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship, Responsibility and Justice in Roberto Bola¤o´s Distant Star; Rory O´Bryen 2. Roberto Bola¤o´s Flower War: Memory, Melancholy, and Pierre Menard; Ignacio López-Calvo PART II: TWO MAJOR NOVELS 3. 666 Twinned and Told Twice: Roberto Bola¤o´s Double Time Frame in 2666; Margaret Boe Birns 4. Ulysses´ Last Voyage: Bola¤o and the Allegorical Figuration of Hell; Raúl Rodríguez Freire 5. Con la cabeza en el abismo: Roberto Bola¤o´s Los detectives salvajes and 2666, Literary Guerrilla, Maquiladora of Death and the Search for the Masterpiece; Martín Camps PART III: SHORT NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES 6. Valjean in The Age of Javert: Roberto Bola¤o in the Era of Neoliberalism; Nicholas Birns 7. Literature and Proportion in The Insufferable Gaucho; Brett Levinson PART IV: POETRY 8. Performing Disappearance: Heaven and Sky in Roberto Bola¤o and Raúl Zurita; Luis Bagué Quílez 9. Bola¤o´s Big Bang: the Writer´s Search of a Voice in Antwerp by Roberto Bola¤o; Enrique Salas-Durazo

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Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced, USA. He is the author of seven books including Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Tusán Literature and Knowledge in Peru, The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, and Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction.

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