In 1877, Chief Standing Bear's Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to Oklahoma—known then as Indian Territory—in what became the tribe's own Trail of Tears. "I Am a Man" chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a six-hundred-mile walk to return the body of his only son to their traditional burial grounds.

Along the way, it examines the complex relationship between

All Ben Allison wants in El Paso is to buy a horse. But after the sale falls through, he runs into an old acquaintance and agrees to escort her son home to his father. But Ben is late and misses the stagecoach, and when it's attacked by Apaches, the boy is kidnapped because Ben wasn't there to protect him. Will he be able to fix the mess he never intended to be a part of in the first place?

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Márquez of his generation. In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Bolaño tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes—the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself—on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe.

Brilliantly rendered into English