Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts.
— The Guardian
Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: a trove of strangely arresting, short master works.
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).
Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts.
— The Guardian
Although the thirteen stories that make up Roberto Bolaño’s newly translated collection percolate with brooding darkness, they also bubble with a surprising luminosity…each richer and more resonant than the last.
— Time Out New York
The sense of embattlement that animates the writing, and the scab-picking intensity that he brings to his obsessions, makes The Return a compelling encapsulation of Bolaño’s work.
— Los Angeles Times
Genius: This new collection of thirteen stories proves to be a defining sampler of Bolaño’s style, thematic concerns and favored character types.
— Booklist
Dark, intimate, and sneakily touching: there is gold to be found in this collection.
— Michael Greenberg, The New York Review of Books
