The Return

As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities of Bolaño's short stories is that they can do the "work of a novel." The Return contains thirteen unforgettable stories bent on returning to haunt you. Wide-ranging, suggestive, and daring, a Bolaño story might concern the unexpected fate of a beautiful ex-girlfriend or a dream of meeting Enrique Lihn: his plots go anywhere and everywhere and they always surprise. Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot-and what follows next defies the imagination (except Bolaño's own).

Although a few have been serialized in The New Yorker and Playboy, most of the stories of The Return have never before appeared in English, and to Bolaño's many readers will be like catnip to the cats.