Forerunners to this type of fictional writer biographies can be seen in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, particularly "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain".

Juan is a novelist and politician while Luz is a talented but troubled poet who suffers failed marriages, struggles with alcoholism and overweight, and is eventually doomed by her love for a much younger woman.

As if he were Borges’s wisecracking, sardonic son, Bolaño has meticulously created a tightly woven network of far-right littérateurs and purveyors of belles lettres for whom Hitler was beauty, truth and great lost hope.

"[6] John Brenkman of The Village Voice sees the book as both a satire and an elegy, stating, "Nazi Literature in the Americas is first of all a prank, an act of genius wasting its time in parodic attacks on a hated sort of writer.

"[9]Paul Grimstad of Columbia University wonders whether the idea of the work was hinted by a Stanislaw Lem's review of a fictional book Gruppenführer Louis XVI in the collection A Perfect Vacuum.

[10] Publishers Weekly opined in a brief review that "The wild inventiveness of Bolaño’s evocations places them squarely in the realm of Borges—another writer who draws enormous power from the movement between the fictive and the real.