The Return

3,One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation. --John Banville, The Nation A genius . . . Bola?o had the courage to look at the world anew. --Ilan Stavans, The Washington Post Composed of thirteen indelible stories, Roberto Bola?o's The Return is preoccupied with ghosts: troubled souls haunting society's margins, lovers lost to the ages, young men who no longer recognize themselves in the mirror, fresh corpses afforded no peace, departed poets who visit us in dreams. These tales capture the extremes of human experience--sex, violence, death--and the mundane acts that linger in between, with Bola?o's inimitable mordant humor and trenchant insight into what drives us. A master of the short form, Bola?o is as interested in the act of storytelling as he is in the stories themselves: how they nestle within one another; how they shift, spread, and scatter; and how they return to us again and again.