Nazi Literature in the Americas

Roberto Bolaño

Translated by Chris Andrews
01 October 2010
9780330510516
272 pages

Synopsis

Featuring several mass-murdering authors, two fraternal writers at the head of a football-hooligan ring and a poet who crafts his lines in the air with sky writing, Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas details the lives of a rich cast of characters from one of the most extraordinary imaginations in world literature.

Written with sharp wit and virtuosic flair, this encyclopaedic group of fictional pan-American authors is the terrifyingly humorous and remarkably inventive masterpiece which made Bolaño famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

One of the most exhilarating, intense and dangerous voices to emerge from South America . . . [Nazi Literature in the Americas] is a parade of delusional, mediocre, vicious and pitiable poetasters, a scabrous parlour game that reveals much about literature, power and complicity. Very funny indeed.
The triumphant posthumous entrance of Roberto Bolaño into the English-language literary firmament has been one of the sensations of the decade.
The best and weirdest kind of literary game . . . This artful alternate history of modern literature, stitched together from loose ends, half-told stories and deft episodes of pastiche, is a strangely profound place to get lost.