Thirteen variations on the themes of despair, madness, substantive literature, as well as its absence, the disappearing beauty, love, death, and the dark destiny of humans. Roberto Bolaño continuously abolishes borders, blending irony and fantasy, fiction texts, real people, and nightmares: castrations of children, black magic, wandering, pornography, murders, despair, hymns to beloved writers, irony, and loneliness...

An impressive collection that showcases the measure of the Chilean author's prodigious talent, thirteen stories that approach violence, necessity, and compassion for life, where behind failure and silence, the melancholic energy of the author emerges, establishing him as one of the most important voices in Spanish literature.

"Women are murderous whores, Max, they are trembling monkeys in the cold, gazing at the horizon from a sick tree, they are princesses searching for you in the darkness, crying, searching for the words they will never be able to say. We live in misunderstanding and there we trace the circles of our lives," says the heroine (a murderer? a whore? both?) of the story that gives its title to this collection. In "Last Evenings on Earth," the narrator recounts a journey to Acapulco with his father, which gradually turns into a descent into hell. In "The Dentist," we read the story of a mysterious teenager and two adults who are bored with everything and look around them from the top of a cliff. In "Buba," we read a soccer story through three characters: a Latin American, an African, and a Spanish soccer player, and the impressive story of their team, which could easily be Barcelona. In "Dance Card," we find 59 reasons not to dance with Pablo Neruda. In "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," on the contrary, a story emerges with drug dealers and porn film directors, while "Photographs," one of the last stories, takes us back once again to Arturo Belano, the protagonist of "The Savage Detectives."