a Latin American, adding that "my only country is my two children and wife and perhaps, though in second place, some moments, streets, faces or books that are in me, and which one day I will forget..." Works Although known for his novels and short stories, Bolaño was a prolific poet of free verse and prose poems. Bolaño, who saw himself primarily as a poet, said, "Poetry is more than enough for me," a character says in The Savage Detectives, "although sooner or later I'm bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories." In rapid succession, he published a series of critically acclaimed works, the most important of which are the novel Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), the novella Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile), and, posthumously, the novel 2666. His two collections of short stories Llamadas telefónicas and Putas asesinas were awarded literary prizes. In 2009 a number of unpublished novels were discovered among the author's papers. Novels and novellas The Skating Rink The Skating Rink (La pista de hielo in Spanish) is set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona and is told by three male narrators while revolving around a beautiful figure-skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in a local ruin of a mansion, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. Nazi Literature in the Americas Nazi Literature in the Americas (La literatura Nazi en América in Spanish) is an entirely fictitious, ironic encyclopedia of fascist Latin American and American writers and critics, blinded to their own mediocrity and sparse readership by passionate self-mythification. While this is a risk that literature generally runs in Bolaño's works, these characters stand out by force of the heinousness of their political philosophy. Published in 1996, the events of the book take place from the late 19th century up to 2029. The last portrait was expanded into a novel in Distant Star. Distant Star Distant Star (Estrella distante in Spanish) is a novella nested in the politics of the Pinochet regime, concerned with murder, photography and even poetry blazed across the sky by the smoke of air force planes. This dark satirical work deals with the history of Chilean politics in a morbid and sometimes