From the eponymous novella in the collection Cowboy Graves, which will be published this month by Penguin Press. The text of this story was discovered in a file named VAKEROS.doc on Bolaño’s hard drive and is estimated to have been written between 1995 and 1998. Translated from the Spanish.

My mother read mail-order romance novels sent from Santiago and she read paranormal magazines. My father read only westerns. I read Nicanor Parra and I thought that gave me an advantage. It gave me no advantage at all, of course. Which was more or less what Mónica Vargas told me…