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A Writer Crosses Over
New Directions has half a dozen more short Bolaño works coming, Epler says, "and I think we'll eventually do the poetry."
  (Farrar, Straus And Giroux - Farrar, Straus And Giroux) |
"[T]he only protagonist of Bolaño's work -- the authentic heroine of his books -- is literature itself. Literature as Golden Fleece or Holy Grail or Rosebud-branded sled pursued to the bitter end by men and women who believe solely in it."
-- Novelist Rodrigo Fresán, in the Believer
Farrar, Straus editor Lorin Stein has his own story of discovering Roberto Bolaño's work.
Stein -- an intense, slightly built man of 33 who grew up in Washington -- is precisely the kind of literary obsessive most likely to be drawn to a writer like Bolaño. In high school, at Sidwell Friends, he gravitated immediately to the literary magazine. One summer, he and some friends pooled their money and hired a favorite Sidwell teacher to conduct a special poetry class.
Scuffling around after college, Stein got a part-time job at Publisher's Weekly while trying to find work with a book publisher. He didn't know one from the other when he started, but he learned.
One day a PW colleague pulled a book off a shelf and offered it to him to take home and review over the weekend. Farrar, Straus is publishing it, she told him, "so it probably won't be a waste of your time."
"I've told my boss this so many times," Stein says, laughing, "when there was a book I didn't think we should publish."
