For a certain demographic of high-lit dorks, 2666 is like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: We’ve been shivering for it for months. Given the current climate of critical love, it might even have a shot at becoming the Infinite Jest–style Strangely Popular Giant Novel of the Year. It promises all the Bolaño signatures: sex, violence, nightmares, stories within stories, obsessed obsessives, an intercontinental hunt for a literary recluse, radical art (one painter finishes a self-portrait by affixing his mummified severed hand to the canvas), and the occasional five-page-long sentence. The big question will be, can a former poet whose mind seems to work most powerfully in short dashes, and whose long novels tend to feel like rapid successions of short fevers, sustain our attention for almost 900 pages? Either way, its publication is bittersweet: Although it marks the end, finally, of the English-speaking world’s Bolaño lag, it’s also the end, forever, of our new Bolaño.

A subset of those high-lit dorks have been carrying around galleys since the beginning of summer . . . I’m almost done reading this (it really is long, and has big pages to boot), and it’s absolutely astounding. (I actually got an e-mail yesterday in which someone claimed that it might well be the greatest book ever.)

This write-up is nice, if not a bit inaccurate. This fall New Directions is bringing out a collection of Bolano’s poetry, and they have a few more titles coming out over the next few years. ND is publishing everything by Bolano, except for The Savage Detectives and 2666, so thankfully this isn’t the end of new Bolano titles . . .

Some of the recommended books include Daniel Sada’s Porque Parece Mentira la Verdad Nunca Se Sabe, which is a title I’ve been interested in for a while. And according to Francisco Goldman, Sada was the “contemporary Mexican novelist Roberto Bolaño most admired.”

Martin Gambarrota of the Buenos Aires Herald praised Marcelo Cohen, calling him “arguably Argentina’s most established novelist at the moment. His books read like Kafka on the brink of turning into science fiction.”

Norman Manea recommends Gabriela Adamesteanu’s Provizoriu, and Dedi Felman, editor for Simon & Schuster and Words Without Borders, compares Norwegian author Johan Harstad to Jonathan Safran Foer for his combination of “formal play and linguistic ferocity with a searing emotional directness.”

The whole list is worth checking out, although I wish there were links to the books and translated excerpts of the books.

It’s also funny that this article is in response to the fact that the world’s “gone gaga for Roberto Bolaño this summer.” Could it happen? Could one superstar in translation serve as a gateway drug to getting publishers and readers to publish and read more translations? Probably not, but it’s pretty to think so.