The Romantic Dogs

Description

The Romantic Dogs is a bilingual collection of forty-four poems presents English readers with a chance to encounter the phenomenon of Roberto Bolano as a poet: his own preferred and strongest literary persona. (When asked, `What makes you believe that you're a better poet than a novelist?' Bolano replied, `The poetry makes me blush less.') These poems - intimate, moving, witty and wide-ranging - are as diverse in form as his fiction and will offer the reader equal delight. Expertly translated from the original Spanish by Laura Healy, this is as an opportunity to encounter a poetic voice like no other; a voice hailed by Susan Sontag as `the real thing and the rarest'.

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives won the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize and Natasha Wimmer's translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.

Wonderfully unreserved. * New York Review of Books * They radiate the audacity of intellect, as well as the cruelty of vision, that have won their author a devoted following. * Boston Review * They [the poems] echo his brilliant but out-of-control authorial persona, with its high-speed, self-conscious verbal play, and those echoes will be more than enough to lead fans of his prose straight to his verse. * Publisher's Weekly * Poems that unscroll like black-and-white movies or occupy the page like a tattoo, art and life entwine, and all is sinister and precious. * Booklist *