Roberto Bolaño has attained an almost mythical stature and is often considered the most influential Latin American writer of his generation. The first English-language volume of essays on the Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño, a Less Distant Star: Critical Essays, includes ten critical essays of his oeuvre. With a special emphasis on his masterpieces: 2666, The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile, and Distant Star, the essays address topics such as Borges's influence and the role of repetition, social memory, allegory, and neoliberalism.

Introduction; Ignacio López-Calvo. Preface: On Roberto Bolaño; Siddhartha Deb. PART I: GENERAL OVERVIEWS 1. Writing with The Ghost of Pierre Menard: Authorship, Responsibility and Justice in Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star; Rory O'Bryen 2. Roberto Bolaño's Flower War: Memory, Melancholy, and Pierre Menard; Ignacio López-Calvo PART II: TWO MAJOR NOVELS 3. 666 Twinned and Told Twice: Roberto Bolaño's Double Time Frame in 2666; Margaret Boe Birns 4. Ulysses' Last Voyage: Bolaño and the Allegorical Figuration of Hell; Raúl Rodríguez Freire 5. Con la cabeza en el abismo: Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes and 2666, Literary Guerrilla, Maquiladora of Death and the Search for the Masterpiece; Martín Camps PART III: SHORT NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES 6. Valjean in The Age of Javert: Roberto Bolaño in the Era of Neoliberalism; Nicholas Birns 7. Literature and Proportion in The Insufferable Gaucho; Brett Levinson PART IV: POETRY 8. Performing Disappearance: Heaven and Sky in Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita; Luis Bagué Quílez 9. Bolaño's Big Bang: the Writer's Search of a Voice in Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño; Enrique Salas-Durazo

Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced, USA. He is the author of seven books including Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Tusán Literature and Knowledge in Peru, The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, and Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction.