A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini-encyclopedia of nonexistent Nazi literature, Bolano\'s work is a tour de force of black humor.
The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7)..
Authors from twelve different countries are included.
The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse.
Ernesto Pérez Masón, for example, in the sample included here, is an imaginary member of the real Orígenes group in Cuba, and his farcical clashes with José Lezama Lima recall stories about the spats between Lezama Lima and Virgilio Pinera, as recounted in Guillermo Cabrera Infante\'s Mea Cuba.
All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds.
Nazi Literature in the Americas 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.
It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition.
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.
When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent.
Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolano\'s books to reach a wide public.
A playful and entirely original novel masquerading as a mini-encyclopedia of nonexistent Nazi literature, Bolano\'s work is a tour de force of black humor
