Book Alert / Nazi Literature in the Americas

Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano, New Directions '08, $23.95, 227 pages, ISBN #0811217051. Sources, unillustrated.

Chilean writer Roberto Bolano has been compared to Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez as among the finest novelists writing in the Spanish language -- or any language, for that matter. Thanks to a new translation by Chris Andrews, English readers can enjoy the book that first brought the highly-innovative Bolano to public attention in 1996. With nine novels, two story collections and five books of poetry to his credit, Bolano died in 2003 at age 50.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is "a biographical dictionary of writers in our hemisphere who flirted with or espoused extrme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries," writes his publisher, "employing black humor and imaginary erudition....All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds." The writers originate from 12 different countries, including the United States.