Nazi Literature in the Americas

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.

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City. His first full-length novel, The Savage Detectives, won the Herralde Prize and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and Natasha Wimmer’s translation of The Savage Detectives was chosen as one of the ten best books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Bolaño died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty. Described by the New York Times as "the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation", in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666.