In the tradition of Borges, Nabakov, and Bolaño, The Red Album is a work of fiction that questions historical authenticity and authority. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an edited and footnoted narrative of dubious origins. In the second part, a section of "documents" (including essays, memoirs, a short play and a filmography) shed light on the first narrative. Familiar characters are revealed to be writers, and the writer and editors of the initial narrative are revealed to be characters. As the ghosts of social revolutions of the past are lifted from the soil in Catalonia, and a new revolution unfolds in South America, the number of mysteriously missing author/characters grows almost as fast as new author/ characters emerge and complicate and scatter the threads of the story.