Roberto Bolaño lived a life of poverty, exile, frustration, obscurity, sickness, and immense dedication. Convinced he would die unpublished, Bolaño wrote with explosive productivity, publishing eight novels and three collections of short stories in the final decade of his life, with a diagnosis of terminal liver disease hanging over him. He died at age 50 in 2003 at the brink of international fame, failing to see his long literary novels combat teenage werewolves on the New York Times best-seller list.
    Bolaño’s untimely death fanned the flames of his celebrity in the United States, where, despite ongoing jeremiads about the decline of serious reading, he has come to rival other international writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (or Grass or Kundera or Camus) at the height of their fame. In the world of corporate publishing, the only thing viewed with more circumspection than long literary fiction is long literary fiction in translation. When The Savage Detectives and 2666, literary novels written in Spanish (and expertly translated into English by Natasha Wimmer) with 1500 pages between them, joined the ranks of Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater and The Land of Mango Sunsets on the best-seller list, their inexplicable sales caught the attention of US publishing, which, in a myopic daze, has become so risk-averse that many of what we consider to be great works of American literature would never have been published had their authors been born after Vietnam.
    Within five years of his death, the meager financial boons Bolaño had hoped to secure for his children had been far surpassed by the global success of his books’ sales and looming contracts with the heavyweights of international publishing. In 2008, Bolaño’s widow, Carolina Lopez, cashed in, replacing Bolaño’s longtime Spanish agent, Carmen Barcells, with Andrew Wylie, an industry titan infamous for poaching famous authors and whose impressive client list includes the estates of foreign A-listers Jorge Luis Borges, W. H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov. In October 2008, word spread first through the Spanish papers, then via the blogosphere into the New York press that the Wylie agency was showing a previously unknown novel called The Third Reich (El Tercer Reich), discovered among Bolaño's papers after his death, to publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
    2666, an unpublishable novel, a novel that breaks every code of conduct in the corporate publishers’ playbook, hit 25 on the New York Times best-seller list in November 2008. Bolaño's name was appearing in mass market publications on both sides of the Atlantic. The unknown novel’s discovery seemed too good, too Bolañesco to be true.