Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Book)

Amazon Significant Seven, February 2008: As with the emergence of W.G. Sebald into English a decade ago, the most exciting new writer to watch is one we're just catching up with: the late Roberto Bolaño, whose ground-breaking fiction defined a generation of Spanish-speaking literature. In between last year's thrillingly meandering epic, The Savage Detectives, and the upcoming alleged masterwork, 2666, comes a small and strange book (but no stranger than the rest), Nazi Literature in the Americas. Presented as a biographical encyclopedia of right-wing writers in North and South America, these short, invented lives are full of the stuff of minor literary scenes and forgotten books, with delusion and creation mixed in equal fashion. Funny, melancholy, surprisingly tender, and--once in a while--erupting into fury, Bolaño spins out tale after tale with the joy of sheer invention and the burden of inescapable history. --Tom Nissley