The Unknown University
“There are moments of bliss. Bolano had one of 20th-century literature’s great dirty minds, and many of this volume’s best lines are unpublishable here.... A handful of these poems are something akin to sly masterpieces.... The soundThe Unknown Universitymostly makes is that of a promising young writer seeking his way in the world of words.... Bolano was hungry, this book reminds you, for just about everything.” (Dwight Garner - The New York Times)“The Unknown University, a new anthology of Bolano's poetry, reads like a series of fragments from a diary of this epic artistic journey. It's a book filled with sorrows and joys and discoveries as Bolano the poet takes up themes that are repeated often in his novels. For him, writers are men and women engaged in a sacred search, with poets the purest seekers of all. It's a pursuit that's all the more noble, given that Bolano knows that the immortality writers seek is unattainable.” (Los Angeles Times)“It is his earliest work published in English to date, and fans ofThe Savage Detectiveswill hope to find in it some hints of what the real Visceral Realist poetry was like.... It is a testament to Bolano’s fundamental artistic honesty that buried here, in his own long-lost notebook, we find Cesárea Tinajero’s poem/drawing, written twenty years earlier. He was the master of smoke and mirrors, but he couldn’t lie.” (The Millions)