books @ cc.

by Roberto Bolaño (2000)

A first-person narration novella, By Night in Chile is a deathbed confession of Father Urrutia, a.k.a. Father Ibacache, a half-hearted Jesuit priest and literary critic. Set during the transition from Allende to Pinochet, the novella — written in one single paragraph except for the last sentence — paints the turbulent political landscape with particular emphasis on the state, the church, and the literary/artistic figures.

by Roberto Bolaño

Selected from Editorial Anagrama’s collections, the short stories in Last Evenings on Earth were previously published in English in The New Yorker, Grand Street, and Tin House. Written in direct, short sentences, one feels, as Bolaño said (or so according to the book jacket), “the melancholy folklore of exile” pervading these stories.

Non-Fiction 1922-1986
by Jorge Luis Borges

This is a collection of more than 150 non-fiction pieces (critical essays, movie & book reviews, prologues, introductions) grouped chronologically from his earlier (disowned) writings to the year of his death in 1986. Some of these pieces have also appeared in Labyrinths. Most are short, with longer pieces dedicated to certain subjects well-associated with Borges (The Thousand and One Night, time, dreams, labyrinth…).

by Felisberto Hernández

One reads Hernández’ stories feeling as if drifting through fluid, phantasmagorical trance, animistic worlds where everyday objects take a life of their own, eliciting delicate forgotten responses, thoughts, feelings and memories. There are fifteen stories in this book, three of which are slightly longer pieces (The Stray Horse, The Daisy Dolls, The Flooded House), all of them inevitably in one way or another relate to a piano.