‘If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.’

A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up his job in the city for an improbable return to the family farm in the Pampas. An elusive film-maker and the little-known Argentinian novelist whose work he's plagiarized for years, finally fall into confrontation.

Unpredictable and daring, highly controlled and yet somehow haywire, the five short stories included in The Insufferable Gaucho are some of Roberto Bolaño's best. In addition, two essays are included: provocative and often scathing, they too are alive with Bolaño's trademark humour, violence and utter faith in the power of the written word.

TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS

‘An exemplary literary rebel’ New York Review of Books

‘A master of the short form’ Independent

‘Bolaño wrote with the high-voltage first-person braininess of a Saul Bellow and an extreme subversive vision of his own’ New York Times