Nazi Literature in the Americas Audiobook

A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Comprising short biographies about imaginary writers from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and the United States, Nazi Literature in the Americas includes descriptions of the writers’ works, cross-references, a bibliography, and also an “Epilogue for Monsters.” All the writers are carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. There are fourteen thematic sections with titles such as “Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment,” “Magicians, Mercenaries, and Miserable Individuals,” and “North American Poets.”

Brisk and pseudoacademic, Nazi Literature in the Americas delicately balances irony and pathos. Bolaño does not simply use his writers for target practice: in the space of a few pages he manages to sketch character portraits that are often pathetically funny, sometimes surprisingly moving, and, on occasion, authentically chilling. A remarkably inventive, funny, and disquieting sui generis novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas offers a clear view into the workings of one of the most extraordinarily fecund literary imaginations of our time.

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“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 great lost hope. Cross-referenced, complete with bibliography and a biographical list of secondary figures, Nazi Literature is composed of a series of sketches, the compressed life stories of writers in North and South America who never existed, but all too easily could have. Goose-stepping caricatures a la ‘The Producers’ they are not; instead, they are frighteningly subtle, poignant and plausible.”

— New York Times