So Jealous

Over at the Literary Saloon it appears that Michael Orthofer has received a galley of Nazi Literature in the Americas, the next Bolano book to be published in English. It’s due out from New Directions in February, which is a mere 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 months away. (A third of a year! Good God!)

Well, it’s never too soon to start the hype, and Orthofer does a great job of writing selling-type copy:

First of all, it comes with an epigraph by Augusto Monterroso, which already goes a long way in winning us over.

The book itself is a sort of mock-encyclopedia of imagined author-lives, complete with an extensive bibliography (a closing section titled ‘Epilogue for Monsters’). At just over two hundred pages it looks the right size not to be too wearing, and this seems exactly the sort of thing Bolaño’s talents are suited for.

An excerpt is available in the latest Virginia Quarterly Review and if you have access to back issues of Grand Street, an excerpt appeared in issue 70, back in 2002.