A Little Lumpen Novelita
Picador
Available: 12/02/25
5.35 x 8.2 · 128 pages
9781250338570
CDN $21.00
· pb
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"An exemplary literary rebel." - Sarah Kerr, The New York Review of Books
"[Bolaño] demonstrates . . . what is possible in fiction - which is to say, anything." - William Deresiewicz, The New Republic
Now I'm a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime. So begins the story of Bianca, whom a car crash has overnight left an orphan and, only a teenager herself, a caregiver to her younger brother. Abandoned by social services, the siblings drop out of school, attempt to survive on their late father's meager pension, and lie around their family home in an apathetic stupor. Things take a turn for the bizarre when Bianca's brother brings home from the gym a pair of dubiously intentioned strangers, who move in and make themselves the odd bedfellowsof the siblings. When the housemates devise a scheme to escape their indigence - one that involves a blind, aging former bodybuilder, an eerie old house, a fabled fortune locked in a safe, and Bianca's powers of seduction - she finds herself in a moral haze, forced to consider whether the act that could beget her future may also be her undoing. Taut, tense, and tragicomic, Roberto Bolaño's A Little Lumpen Novelita tells a tale of dispossession, dreams, and the blurred line between fate and fortune.
Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolaño's 2666, for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and The Savage Detectives. She lives in New York.
