Posted on November 2, 2009 by Scott Esposito

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s angry dissection of the so-called Bolano myth has been published in English by Guernica magazine. In part, Moya says:

I don’t know if it’s my bad luck or if it happens to my colleagues as well, but every time that I’ve found myself on American soil—at the airport bar, at a social gathering, wherever—and I’ve made the mistake of admitting to a citizen of that country that I’m a fiction writer who comes from Latin America, that person will immediately pull out García Márquez, and will do it, what’s more, with a self-satisfied smile, as if he were saying to me, “I know you, I know where you come from.” (Of course, I’ve found myself with wilder ones who boast about Isabel Allende or Paolo Coelho, which, ultimately, makes no difference at all, since Allende and Coelho are little more than the light and self-help versions of García Márquez.) As time goes by, however, those same North Americans, at those same bars and social gatherings, have begun to pull out Bolano.

For more on Moya, you can listen to audio from our event with his translator, Katherine Silver. And for more on Bolano, check out our audio from the Natasha Wimmer event we did in October.