The Insufferable Gaucho

If you've been meaning to read the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, but have been daunted by the ambitions of his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666, let me recommend this collection of seven playful prose pieces—stories, essays, and some writing falling in between—as a perfect invitation to his intriguing and marvelously idiosyncratic work.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

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