**Wide-ranging, suggestive, and ever-daring, Roberto Bolaño's short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels.**From melancholic portraits of exile and its folklore to a rogue’s gallery of desperate characters futilely attempting to unearth the a...

**Wide-ranging, suggestive, and ever-daring, Roberto Bolaño's short stories map out the dark terrain that he would go on to explore in his novellas and epic novels.**From melancholic portraits of exile and its folklore to a rogue’s gallery of desperate characters futilely attempting to unearth the animating secrets of the world, each of Bolaño’s short fictions adds yet another door, a window, a secret passage onto the sinister, eerie universe that Bolaño brought to life across his body of work.

Bringing together* Last Evenings on Earth *, The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho, as well as Bolaño’s posthumously published stories, this new book marks the first time these fictions have been collected in one edition, allowing for a major reappraisal of the vital place that the short story commands for Bolaño’s literary legacy.