Roberto Bolano - Nazi Literature in the Americas (2008) torrent

Roberto Bolaño - Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, 2008). Translated by Chris Andrews.

ISBN: 9780811217057 | 280 pages | EPUB


NAZI LITERATURE IN THE AMERICAS is a work of fiction by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) and was the first of his books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. The book presents itself as a biographical dictionary of American writers who flirted with or espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.

The book is composed of short biographies, including descriptions of the writers' works, plus an epilogue ("for Monsters"), which includes even briefer biographies of persons mentioned in passing. Although the writers are invented, they are all carefully situated in real literary worlds: Bolaño's characters rebuff Allen Ginsberg's advances in Greenwich Village, encounter Octavio Paz in Mexico City, and quarrel with José Lezama Lima in Cuba.

Chris Andrews’ English translation was shortlisted for the 2008 Best Translated Book Award.


Reviews

"Nazi Literature in the Americas, a wicked invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers, is Bolaño playing with sharp, twisting knives. As if he were Borges's wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right litterateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth, and the great lost hope." -- Stacey D'Erasmo, New York Times Book Review