A Little Lumpen Novelita

A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a young writer's fierce ambitions and intensely tender love of women.

?Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime?: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome in A Little Lumpen Novelita. Orphaned overnight as a teenager??our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us??she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, sees a terrible brightness at night, and drifts into bad company. Her little brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns she can drift lower?

Electric, tense with foreboding, and written in jagged, propulsive short chapters, A Little Lumpen Novelita?one of the first novels Roberto Bolano ever published?delivers a surprising, fractured tale of taking control of one?s fate.