"We savor all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius."---Patti Smith<BR><BR>"The short story can be as capacious a form as the novel---as one Bolano narrator remarks, `The story was four pages long; maybe that's why I chose it, because it was short, but when I got to the end, I felt as if I had read a novel.' That, of course, is the effect of many of Bolano's stories."---Siddhartha Deb, Harper's<BR><BR>"Electrifying."---Time<BR><BR>"Bolano's prose marries humor and irony, violence and love, poetry and death. In several essays Borges recast Hamlet's final words: And all the rest is literature. A good disciple (and there-fore a rebel), Bolano arrived at his own interpretation, one that is more pertinent to the tragic destiny of his beloved Chile (and, indeed, much of Latin America): And all the rest is laughter."---Aura Estrada, Bookforum<BR><BR>"Enthralling and haunting."---Francisco Goldman<BR><BR>"A once-in-a-blue-moon rhapsodic reading experience."---Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times<BR><BR>In addition to five brilliant new stories, The Insufferable Gaucho offers for the first time in English two essays by Roberto Bolano: "Literature+Illness=Illness" and "The Myths of Cthulhu." Provocative and often scathing, Bolano's essays were described as "treasure, odd glittering jewels and fistfuls of gold," by Marcela Valdes in The Nation: "In the essays, we hear Bolano's real voice, the one he often disguised through the ventriloquism of his fiction."<BR><BR>The stories in The Insufferable Gaucho---unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire---might concern a stalwartrat police detective investigating terible rodent crimes, or an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly Argentine judge giving up city life for an improbable return to the family estate, now gone to wrack and ruin. The Insufferable Gaucho shows Bolano as a magician of a writer, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.