Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean-born novelist, short story writer, and poet. He grew up in Santiago, Chile and Mexico City, Mexico, before moving to Europe as an adult and eventually settling in Spain. Bolaño died of liver disease in 2003, just before the publication of The Insufferable Gaucho. Bolaño’s illness is alluded to in the penultimate lecture of the book, “Literature + Illness = Illness.” He is most famous for his long novel, 2666, considered a classic of Latin American literature. He is also a notorious critic of the commercialization of literature and of writers who explicitly court readers, something that is revealed in the final lecture of the book, “The Myths of Cthulhu.”

Jim

Jim is the name of the protagonist of the first work in Insufferable Gaucho, the eponymous short story, “Jim.” In the story, Jim is a Vietnam war veteran married to a...