Has Chilean author Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) written the final word on Latin America's insufferable modernity? This investigation asserts that Bolano's novels, short stories, poetry and essays examine to a point of exhaustion the most important aspects of Latin America's modern literary tradition. Bolano's critique of modernity as a violent historical condition is a radical mode of literary articulation. With it, the current models of criticism--world literature, the global novel, postcolonial and transatlantic studies--are undermined, while the very notions of margin and center are...