Download or read book Nazi Literature in the Americas written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-29 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "biographical dictionary" gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. Nazi Literature in the Americas was the first of Roberto Bolano's books to reach a wide public. When it was published by Seix Barral in 1996, critics in Spain were quick to recognize the arrival of an important new talent. 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. It is a tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition. 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. All of the writers are imaginary, although they are all carefully and credibly situated in real literary worlds. 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. The origins of the imaginary writers are diverse. Authors from twelve different countries are included. The countries with the most representatives are Argentina (8) and the USA (7).
Download or read book The Secret of Evil written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection that gathers everything Bolano was working on before his untimely death. A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano’s son Gerónimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory... The various pieces in the posthumous Secret of Evil extend the intricate, single web that is the work of Roberto Bolano.
Download or read book Beyond Bola o written by Héctor Hoyos and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Héctor Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era. Calling attention to fresh innovations in form, voice, perspective, and representation, he also affirms the lead role of Latin American authors in reshaping world literature. Focusing on post-1989 Latin American novels and their representation of globalization, Hoyos considers the narrative techniques and aesthetic choices Latin American authors make to assimilate the conflicting forces at work in our increasingly interconnected world. Challenging the assumption that globalization leads to cultural homogenization, he identifies the rich textual strategies that estrange and re-mediate power relations both within literary canons and across global cultural hegemonies. Hoyos shines a light on the unique, avant-garde phenomena that animate these works, such as modeling literary circuits after the dynamics of the art world, imagining counterfactual "Nazi" histories, exposing the limits of escapist narratives, and formulating textual forms that resist worldwide literary consumerism. These experiments help reconfigure received ideas about global culture and advance new, creative articulations of world consciousness.
Download or read book The Savage Detectives Reread written by David Kurnick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.
Download or read book By Night in Chile written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2003-12-17 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During the course of a single night, Father Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who is a member of Opus Dei, a literary critic and a mediocre poet, relives some of the crucial events of his life. He believes he is dying, and in his feverish delirium various characters, both real and imaginary, appear to him as icy monsters, as if in sequences from a horror film. Among them are the great poet Pablo Neruda, the German novelist Ernst Junger, and General Augusto Pinochet - whom Father Lacroix instructs in Marxist doctrine - as well as various members of the Chilean intelligentsia whose lives, during a period of political turbulence, have touched his own."--Jacket.
Download or read book The Insufferable Gaucho written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat. The stories in The Insufferable Gaucho — unpredictable and daring, highly controlled yet somehow haywire — might concern a stalwart rat police detective investigating terrible rodent crimes, or an elusive plagiarist, or an elderly Argentine lawyer giving up city life for an improbable return to the familye state on the Pampas, now gone to wrack and ruin. These five astonishing stories, along with two compelling essays, show Bolano as a magician, pulling bloodthirsty rabbits out of his hat.
Download or read book The Unknown University written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2013-07-11 with total page 839 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects the poetic works of the Chilean author, including works of prose poetry, fiction in verse, and pieces that defy categorization.
Download or read book Hitler s American Model written by James Q. Whitman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.
Download or read book The Third Reich written by Roberto Bolaño and published by Random House. This book was released on 2024-09-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: War-games champion Udo Berger is finally on holiday. Travelling to the Costa Brava with his long-ignored girlfriend, Ingeborg, there they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals. They have fun, see the sights, relax. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace. Desperate to solve the mystery, Udo refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. Increasingly frightened, the situation slips beyond his grasp and Udo suddenly realizes that the consequences of this ‘game’ are much more serious than he ever imagined. TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER ‘Capering, weird, rascally and short... The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño’s first-rate efforts’ The Economist ‘A mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated... Classic Bolaño’ Washington Post
Download or read book Hitler and America written by Klaus P. Fischer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most efficient methods of production—especially in iron and coal, which formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named "Amerika." In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a place that Hitler admired—for the can-do spirit of the American people, which he attributed to their Nordic blood—and envied—for its enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power. Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to the Jews. Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led to his defeat.
Download or read book Last Evenings on Earth written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of the "failed generation" set in the Chilean exile diaspora of Latin America and Europe.
Download or read book Antwerp written by Roberto Bolaño and published by Picador. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It’s hard to think of a writer who has multiplied the possibilities more times than Roberto Bolaño . . . [Antwerp is] exceptional and moving.” —Nicole Krauss, The Guardian Oft called the “big bang” of Roberto Bolaño’s universe, Antwerp is his first novel—or the shattered remnants of one. Written when he was just twenty-seven years of age, it was so intensely strange and solitary that he tucked it away for more than twenty years, certain that any publisher would slam the door in his face. It proceeds in hallucinatory sketches: a lonely highway, a desolate campground, a freshly abandoned hotel room; a tryst, an interrogation, a murder; and somewhere just out of reach, a young, feverish writer named Roberto Bolaño drifting in and out of view. A radical, sui generis effort by a burgeoning genius, Antwerp is an essential part of Bolaño’s oeuvre.
Download or read book Amulet written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2008-05-17 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolano's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry," hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University. She's tall, thin, and blonde, and her favorite young poet in the 1970s is none other than Arturo Belano (Bolano's fictional stand-in throughout his books). As well as her young poets, Auxilio recalls three remarkable women: the melancholic young philosopher Elena, the exiled Catalan painter Remedios Varo, and Lilian Serpas, a poet who once slept with Che Guevara. And in the course of her imaginary visit to the house of Remedios Varo, Auxilio sees an uncanny landscape, a kind of chasm. This chasm reappears in a vision at the end of the book: an army of children is marching toward it, singing as they go. The children are the idealistic young Latin Americans who came to maturity in the '70s, and the last words of the novel are: "And that song is our amulet."
Download or read book Hitler s American Friends written by Bradley W. Hart and published by Thomas Dunne Books. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.
Download or read book Roberto Bola o s Fiction written by Chris Andrews and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolaño's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction. Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolaño's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolaño's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolaño's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolaño emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.
Download or read book The Romantic Dogs Poems written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2008-11-17 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Listed as a "2009 Indie Next List Poetry Top Ten" book by the American Booksellers Association: Roberto Bolano as he saw himself, in his own first calling as a poet. Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has caught on like a house on fire, and The Romantic Dogs, a bilingual collection of forty-four poems, offers American readers their first chance to encounter this literary phenomenon as a poet: his own first and strongest literary persona. These poems, wide-ranging in forms and length, have appeared in magazines such as Harper's, Threepenny Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Soft Targets, Tin House, The Nation, Circumference, A Public Space, and Conduit. Bolano's poetic voice is like no other's: "At that time, I'd reached the age of twenty/and I was crazy. /I'd lost a country/but won a dream./Long as I had that dream/nothing else mattered...."
Download or read book Distant Star written by Roberto Bolaño and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2004-12-17 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime. The narrator, unable to stop himself, tries to track Ruiz-Tagle down, and sees signs of his activity over and over again. A corrosive, mocking humor sparkles within Bolano's darkest visions of Chile under Pinochet. In Bolano's world there's a big graveyard and there's a big graveyard laugh. (He once described his novel By Night in Chile as "a tale of terror, a situation comedy, and a combination pastoral-gothic novel.") Many Chilean authors have written about the "bloody events of the early Pinochet years, the abductions and murders," Richard Eder commented in the The New York Times: "None has done it in so dark and glittering a fashion as Roberto Bolano."
