Maggie's Farm

Looking for Christmas books? Check out Bolano. One quote from the Chronicle review of his work:

Such is the craze around the world for Bolaño's oeuvre that almost everything he wrote is being made available in translation at a dizzying pace. In English, his luminous short stories — Last Evenings on Earth — and his masterful novellas — Distant Star and By Night in Chile — have made it into the canon in Spanish departments and creative-writing programs. In 2007 his magnum opus, The Savage Detectives — which had been awarded the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, the highest distinction for a novel in the Hispanic world, in 1999 — was offered in translation. The story of Arturo Belano (the author's alter ego) and another visceral realist, who search for the mysterious founder of the movement, it has been embraced by critics as proof that literature might be losing readers, but it isn't losing its guts.

He's not for everybody.