Nazi Literature in the Americas - Softcover

Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as an encyclopaedia of extremely right-wing writers. Composed of short biographies of imaginary pan-American authors (the nations with the most representatives are Argentina, with eight, and the USA, with seven), Nazi Literature describes, in fourteen thematic sections, the writers' lives, politics, and literary works. It includes bibliographies, cross-references, and an epilogue (`For Monsters'). Although the writers are invented, they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds: his characters encounter Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz, and Lezama Lima. Remarkably inventive, chilling, and witty, Nazi Literature in the Americas offers keen insights into the workings of an extraordinarily fecund literary imagination.

Roberto Bolano 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 Romulo 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. Bolano 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. Chris Andrews was born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1962. He studied at the University of Melbourne and taught there, in the French program, from 1995 to 2008. He is now teaching at the University of Western Sydney, where he is a member of the Writing and Society Research Center. As well as translating books by Roberto Bolano and Cesar Aira for New Directions, he has published a critical study (Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge, Rodopi, 1999) and a collection of poems (Cut Lunch, Indigo, 2002).