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PLAYBOY: Have you shed any tears over all the times you’ve been criticized by your enemies?

BOLAÑO: Many tears. Every time I read that someone’s said something bad about me I sob, I throw myself on the floor, I claw at myself, I stop writing for an unspecified length of time, I lose my appetite,…

[...] it was a novel that saved me from hell and plummeted me straight back down again. The novel was The Fall, by Camus, and everything that has to do with it I remember as if frozen in a ghostly light, the still light of evening, although I read it, devoured it, by the light of those exceptional …

There are those who reproach Bayly for his neglect of form. On rare occasions, I’ve been one of them. But actually I don’t think that Bayly neglects the formal aspect so much as it might seem at first glance. Especially beginning with his third novel, I think he tries to seek a form that suits his …

But these aren’t Huckleberry Finn’s wrists, they’re Tom Sawyer’s. And that’s Mark Twain’s primary misfortune and also our delight, hypocritical readers, because it seems clear that if Twain had become Huck at some point in his eventful life, he would surely have written nothing or almost nothing, b…

these are the attributes of men who are now American through and through, an impossiblity, no matter how you look at it, an act of the will, an entelechy that neither Melville nor Twain consciously constructs