Abstract

**The first biography of Chilean novelist Roberto Bola ño, the author of the international bestsellers *The* *Savage Detectives* and *2666*** How to know the man behind works of fiction so prone to extravagance? In the first biography of Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño, journalist Monica Maristain tracks Bolaño from his childhood in Chile to his youth in Mexico and his early infatuation with literature, to years of tremendous literary productivity in Spain, and to his untimely death and the posthumous and unprecedented stardom that came with the international publication of his novels *The Savage Detectives* and *2666*. *Bola ño: A Biography in Conversations* is assembled from a series of rich interviews with the people who knew Bolaño best: we meet Bolaño’s first publisher, who printed 225 copies of his first book of poetry; are introduced to his parents and an array of...