Last Evenings on Earth

“Extraordinarily beautiful . . . [Like] a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world.”
—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

A journey to Acapulco gradually becomes a descent into the underworld. An elderly South American writer instructs a protégé in the subterfuges of entering work for provincial literary prizes. A litany unfolds, offering sixty-nine reasons why not to dance with Pablo Neruda. “The melancholy folklore of exile,” as Roberto Bolaño once...