Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was the author of The Savage Detectives and 2666, among many other notable works. Born in Santiago, Chile, he later lived in Mexico City, Paris, and Barcelona. His accolades include the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Premio Rómulo Gallegos. He died at the age of fifty and is widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation.

Chris Andrews has translated books of prose fiction by César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, Liliana Colanzi, and Ágota Kristóf, among others. He is also the author of How to Do Things with Forms and The Oblong Plot.

"Full of moral and political urgency . . . Excellent."
--Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian

"The beauty of [this] slender mystery novel . . . is that it doesn't behave much like a mystery novel . . . This is the novel as Max Ernst or de Chirico might have written it . . . It is Bolaño's great gift to make us feel the dimensions of [a] darkness even when we cannot see exactly what it hides."
--Will Blythe, The New York Times Book Review

"[Monsieur Pain] offers considerable pleasures . . . It plays with genre the way a cat plays with a mouse . . . [It] opens onto a nocturnal world of intrigue."
--Adam Mansbach, Los Angeles Times

"[A] brilliant, noir-steeped fictional world . . . It remains our great task--and our great thrill and joy--to continue the hunt, through the glorious mazes Bolaño crafted for us."
--Carolina de Robertis, San Francisco Chronicle