The Return — Roberto Bolano

Composed of thirteen indelible stories, Roberto Bolaño's The Return is preoccupied with ghosts: troubled souls hovering in the margins of society, ex-lovers lost to the ages, young men who no longer recognize themselves in the mirror, departed poets who visit us in dreams, fresh corpses not permitted peace. Quintessentially Bolaño, they capture the extremes of human behavior -- sex, violence, death -- and the mundane acts that linger in between, with his characteristically mordant humor and trenchant insight into what drives us. A master of the short form, Bolaño is as interested in the act of the storytelling as in the stories themselves: how they nestle within one another; how they shift, spread, and scatter across time; and how they return to us -- again, and again, and again.