Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño

The Unseen Book Club

In which Max and Dan tackle a work by Roberto Bolaño, one of the truly great novelists of the late 20th century. Nazi Literature in the Americas, originally published in 1996 and translated to English in 2008, is a biographical encyclopedia: a ficitonal canon of pan-American right-wing avant-garde writers. Despite the simple premise, ‘Nazi Literature’ is typical Bolaño: layered, enigmatic, and richly textured with historical and literary references.

We find ourselves returning to the same questions: Why did Bolaño write this book? Why conjure this cabinet of literary monsters? What can be said about history through fiction that cannot be explored through other means? We talk, (or avoid talking about) genealogies of fascism, freaks of Futurism, the political right in the Americas, and the fascination our political enemies' creative, expressive endeavors sometimes provokes in us.

The Hispanic Community of Nations: the Spanish-Argentine nexus and the imagining of a Hispanic Cold War bloc, Daniel Gunnar Kressel (2015)

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