The Foreign List - First Book Club Meeting

Our book club will be discussing our first chosen work, “The Return” by Roberto Bolaño. We chose to start off with a short story anthology that would be easy to read, with enough content to discuss and learn from as a group.

Please bring a copy of the book, and if possible finish reading the first four stories, so that we may foster an engaging and lively discussion.

Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean novelist, short fiction writer, and poet.

Here is a short summary of “The Return”:
“Composed of thirteen indelible stories, Roberto Bolaño’s The Return is preoccupied with ghosts: troubled souls haunting society’s margins, lovers lost to the ages, young men who no longer recognize themselves in the mirror, fresh corpses afforded no peace, departed poets who visit us in dreams. These tales capture the extremes of human experience–sex, violence, death–and the mundane acts that linger in between, with Bolaño’s inimitable mordant humor and trenchant insight into what drives us. A master of the short form, Bolaño is as interested in the act of storytelling as he is in the stories themselves: how they nestle within one another; how they shift, spread, and scatter; and how they return to us again and again.“

You may read it online at these links:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7093649-the-return

https://archive.org/details/robertobolano0000unse/page/n1/mode/1up

Or buy your copy here.