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A Writer Crosses Over

Many believe in the vision and work of the late Roberto Bolaño. Above, Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Lorin Stein and translator Natasha Wimmer. Below, far left, Farrar, Straus publisher Jonathan Galassi; far right, editor in chief of New Directions Barbara Epler. Below center, Bolaño, left, with Spanish writer Alberto Olmos in 1998.
Many believe in the vision and work of the late Roberto Bolaño. Above, Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Lorin Stein and translator Natasha Wimmer. Below, far left, Farrar, Straus publisher Jonathan Galassi; far right, editor in chief of New Directions Barbara Epler. Below center, Bolaño, left, with Spanish writer Alberto Olmos in 1998. (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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New Directions has half a dozen more short Bolaño works coming, Epler says, "and I think we'll eventually do the poetry."

"[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."


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