Beginning this fall, Picador will reissue the majority of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s catalog in English translations. North American print and e-book rights were acquired by Mitzi Angel, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and its imprints, including Picador, via Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency, which represents the Bolaño estate and sold similar rights to Vintage Classics in the U.K. last year. (Penguin Press retains the rights to The Spirit of Science Fiction and Cowboy Graves in the U.S., a Picador representative said.)
"We want to introduce Bolaño to a new readership," Angel said, noting that the opportunity to publish the whole ouevre of an author of his caliber offers an opportunity "to think about all of these different books in conversation with one another." Noting Bolaño's early death, at 50, Angel added that it is extraordinary, " to take a step back and look at what he achieved in such a short space of time."
Picador will launch a “major repackaging program” on September 3 with reissues of By Night in Chile, The Return, and Antwerp. Author Nicole Krauss has written a new introduction for By Night in Chile, which will receive an announced 30,000 first print run; the other two titles publishing this fall have announced print runs of 20,000 and 25,000, respectively. Programming is in the works with McNally Jackson in New York City in September and Hay Forum Dallas in October, the publisher said, with more cities and more details to come.
January will see the publication of three further titles, Amulet and The Insufferable Gaucho, and Monsieur Pain, with three more titles—Posthumous Stories, The Skating Rink, and A Little Lumpen Novelita due in fall of 2025. Distant Star, Nazi Literature in the Americas, and Collected Poetry are slated for release in winter 2026, and an as-yet untitled essay collection (originally published as Between Parentheses) and Last Evenings on Earth are set for fall of that year. The Third Reich and Woes of the True Policeman are both due out in fall 2027.
The program will build to the publication of The Savage Detectives in winter 2027 and 2666 in winter 2028, commemorating the 20th anniversary of those titles’ English-language translations. (FSG is the original U.S. publisher of The Savage Detectives, The Third Reich, Woes of the True Policeman, and 2666.) 2028 also marks what would have been the 75th anniversary of Bolaño’s birth, as well as the 25th anniversary of his death.
"It's great to kind of bring people Bolaño's world, because I think one of the things that I find is that you become kind of addicted to it—you feel this kind of unending curiosity in relation to it," Angel said. "Certainly for anyone who's fascinated by the eeriness in the books, and by his ability to write so chillingly well about evil—I found myself finding his books, sometimes, quite frightening in a way that it's very rare."
But also, Angel suggested, "there's a very appealing world for younger readers," pointing specifically to The Savage Detectives. "You have a community of people—if you are yourself someone who likes to read and who likes to talk about reading—portrayed as a group of people you might want to hang out with," she said. "They're cool, but they read, and they drink, and they take drugs, and they have sex, and they go traveling around."
Angel pointed to the unified cover design of the forthcoming books, with covers by Michael Schmelling and art direction by Rodrigo Corral and Alex Merto, as a key to unlocking interest in Bolaño's work among new readers. "When the designer presents something that encapsulates the book, and that interprets the book almost to an editorial degree, you suddenly have a kind of statement about the book, and that statement can be your way into knowing how to present the book to the world, how to speak about the book, how to get the book in people's hands," she said. "We've got a design that gives people a sense of Roberto Bolaño's mind, the worlds that he brought into being, and this sense of a journey through the hellscapes and surrealism of the literary imagination."
This story has been updated with further information.
