Written by Roberto Bolano - Translated by Natasha Wimmer - Audio book performed by John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, Scott Brick & Grover Gardner - Unabridged Fiction - 2 MP3 COMPACT DISCS- 37.6 hours

Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (September 2009)

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Winner of the 2008 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction

“One of those strange, exquisite, and astonishing experiences that literature offers us only once in a very long time….a writer in full pursuit of the Total Novel, one that not only completes his life’s work but redefines it and raises it to new dizzying heights.” —El País

“Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is bizarre, enigmatic, 898 pages—and the year’s most exciting novel….It is also a masterpiece, and its publication in English translation…is the most electrifying literary event of the year….as bravura a display of novelistic mastery and as devastating a reading experience as you are likely ever to encounter….the meandering quality of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which hits you all the harder because you don’t see it coming.” —Time

"On every page the reader marvels, hypnotized, at the capacity of this baroque writer to encompass all literary genres in a single fascinating, enigmatic story….It is a fully realized work by a pure genius at the height of his powers." —Lire

“[T]he Gabriel García Márquez of our time: politically engaged, formally daring and wildly imaginative….[2666] should cement his reputation as a world-class novelist….[Bolano] exults in his indefatigable storytelling skills and his mastery of an arsenal of styles….In this he is expertly partnered by Natasha Wimmer, whose translation is fluid and faithful….With 2666, Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the 20th-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals.” —Washington Post

“This brilliant behemoth is grander [than The Savage Detectives] in scope, ambition and sheer page count, and translator Wimmer has again done a masterful job….It is safe to predict that no novel this year will have as powerful an effect on the reader as this one.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[T]hink of David Lynch, Marcel Duchamp (both explicitly invoked here), and the Bob Dylan of ‘Highway 61 Revisited,’ all at the peak of their lucid yet hallucinatory powers.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Not just the great Spanish-language novel of this decade, but one of the cornerstones that define an entire literature. 2666 is a magisterial and inimitable.” —La Vanguardia

“To say that 2666 is a novel is like calling a Beethoven symphony a collection of songs. If we must, though, this novel in five parts is without doubt Roberto Bolano's masterwork, epic in scope, labyrinthine, frustrating, disjointed, maybe a bit pretentious, always somewhat aloof—and brilliant….the result might be something akin to what readers felt in 1922 when, faced for the first time with the disquieting modern vision of James Joyce, they picked up Ulysses and were changed by the experience.” —Bookmarks

“Bolano’s true masterpiece…showing Bolaño's mesmerizing ability to spin out tale after tale that balance on the edge between happy-go-lucky hilarity and creeping dread….he writes with a horror that is both haunting and deeply humane.” —Amazon.com Review, Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008

"The book explores evil with irony, without any theory or resolution, relying on storytelling alone as its saving grace....Each story is an adventure: a fresco at once horrifying, delicate, grotesque, redundant, and absurd, revealed by the flashlight of a child who stands at the threshold of a cave he will never leave." —Liveration

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. The epic's subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence and death. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes an enigmatic Prussian novelist who vanishes from the public eye; a group of literary critics who share a passion for the novelist’s works; an African-American journalist sent to Mexico on a sports beat after his mother’s death; and a Chilean professor whose mind is slowly losing its grip on reality. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa, a fictional Juárez on the U.S.-Mexico border, where the serial killings of hundreds of young working class women remain unsolved.

About the Author: ROBERTO BOLAÑO (1953-2003), born in Santiago, Chile, grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998.

About the Translator: NATASHA WIMMER’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and New York Times.