As Pankaj Mishra remarked in , one of the remarkable qualities of Bolaño’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” 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 and , most of the stories of have never before appeared in English, and to Bolaño’s many readers will be like catnip to the cats.
