Considered the "big bang" of Roberto Bolaño's universe, Antwerp is his first novel--or perhaps the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely solitary, so strange, that he didn't share it with any publishers at the time, yet, decades later, he called it the only novel that didn't embarrass him. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a deserted highway, a seaside campground, an abandoned hotel room, a tryst, an interrogation, a murder, and somewhere, just beyond reach, a young, fevered writer named Roberto Bolaño drifts in and out of view. A haunting, radical, and utterly singular effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño's oeuvre.