The Unknown University

Description

Perhaps surprisingly to some of his fiction fans, Roberto Bolano touted poetry as the superior art form. When asked, "What makes you believe you're a better poet than a novelist?" Bolano replied, "The poetry makes me blush less". In 1993, fearing for his health, Bolano began collecting the poetry he had written since his arrival in Spain in 1977. This bilingual edition of The Unknown University represents the author's definitive work in his preferred medium. With poems written in prose, stories in verse, and flashes of writing that can hardly be categorized, The Unknown University is a showcase of Bolano's gift for freely crossing genres. It confirms once again the undeniable genius of this giant of Latin American literature.

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. He is the author of The Savage Detectives, which received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize, and 2666, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He died in Blanes, Spain, aged fifty.

A book filled with sorrows and joys and discoveries as Bolano the poet takes up themes that are repeated often in his novels. For him, writers are men and women engaged in a sacred search, with poets the purest seekers of all. It's a pursuit that's all the more noble, given that Bolano knows that the immortality writers seek is unattainable * Los Angeles Times * In verse, as in prose, Bolano leads us on journeys through a surreal landscape of exile, longing and nostalgia. * Independent *