A man dies while out clubbing, then watches as his body is brought to the home of a famous fashion designer, who fondles it. This is the plot of “The Return,” a late story by Roberto Bolaño. It is also the plot of Bolaño’s authorial afterlife. In the 21 years since his death, his body of work has been handled a lot by Anglophone critics and publishers, who, like so many necrophiliacs, simultaneously consecrate and desecrate their subject. Picador has now embarked on reissuing his translated catalog (originally acquired for the most part by New Directions). The revival started this September with a substantial print run of Antwerp, an elliptical novel in prose poems that Bolaño wrote while working odd jobs at age 27, and it will end with a reissue of 2666, to mark what would have been his 75th birthday. Are we late?

Of course we’re late. Lateness is the condition of reading, and especially of reading in translation. We were late to Hölderlin, late to Kafka, less late to Borges; we were late to Dickinson, late to Keats; we are late, now, to Ursula Parrott, though readers were apparently on time for her in the 1930s. “A person arrives at a gathering and is ignored,” the philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote. “Only afterward do those who were present, not having expected anything unusual, discover what transpired in their midst.” Or a person arrives at a gathering and is lauded, and then the scene is forgotten, and the person with it. Or the scene is forgotten until it is fictionalized by an unknown writer whose fictionalization catapults him (and the long-dead scene) to fame. Lateness isn’t just a condition of Bolaño’s work, much of which was produced with death in view, but one of the drains it swirls. A cottage industry trading in the works of a writer mostly overlooked during his life is the very stuff of his fiction.

Absent from his oeuvre is the I-liked-that-band-first cynicism that has marked his canonization — as if, because we are late, our fondness for his work is mere nostalgia. Absent from, or of another order of magnitude. For Bolaño, a reader who believed that books were a writer’s homeland and that nationalism was a “statue made of shit slowly sinking into the desert,” all literature was world literature, and all literature was headed to the same place: oblivion.

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace,” says a critic in The Savage Detectives, who sounds a lot like Bolaño in a 1998 interview. When Criticism dies, Readers remain. Then Readers die and the Work journeys on, in a process that repeats itself until the Work alone remains. “And one day the Work dies,” the critic concludes, “as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.”

Or everything that begins as literature ends as marketing. In the sixties and seventies, Latin American literature in translation thrived with the help of Rockefeller-funded programs at the Association of American University Presses and the Center for Inter-American Relations, in a bid against Cuba for soft power. The so-called boom’s canon — much of it now out of print or in the midst of small-press resuscitation — by and large came out with major U.S. publishers: One Hundred Years of Solitude with Harper & Row, Hopscotch with Pantheon, Paradiso with FSG, The Obscene Bird of Night with Knopf.

When announcing the 2024 International Booker longlist, the prize administrator said it indicated a “second boom.” In a 2022 New York Times review, a critic wrote that Alejandro Zambra “is sometimes invoked as part of a new ‘boom’ of Latin American writers,” as though the paper weren’t participating in that invocation. Readers have often reverted to the same metaphor: in a 1988 Times article, a reporter claimed a different supposed boom was underway. What about when Bolaño broke out in the U.S. with the English publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007? That was the “Bolaño boom.”

The staleness of the metaphor aside, today’s boom, if one is actually in progress, belongs more to small presses than these earlier iterations: New Directions, Coffee House, Dalkey Archive, NYRB, Fitzcarraldo, Charco Press, Soho, Seven Stories — the list goes on. Sure, conglomeration means NYRB is distributed by Penguin Random House, and sure, certain Latin American writers are publishing with major presses (though these writers, like Zambra, are usually bet on first by the small ones).

As for the Picador reissues, we have much to celebrate: new Criticisms, and new Readers, continue to fall into step with Bolaño’s oeuvre, “the most illuminating and terrible (and also the humblest) of the twentieth century” (to use his description of Kafka’s). The lateness of the reader is a forgivable sin; the lateness of the publisher is not lateness at all.