New Latin American fiction

January 9, 2009 7:23 AM

Looking for recommendations: Contemporary Latin American literature, in translation. (more inside)

I'm looking for fiction after the postwar boom that produced Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes and the rest. And I don't know Spanish or Portuguese, so it needs to be in translation. I know about Isabel Allende and Roberto Bollano. Who else should I know about?

posted by barjo to writing & language (12 comments total)

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
posted by mattbucher at 7:59 AM on January 9

What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes
posted by ocherdraco at 8:03 AM on January 9

I asked the same thing in a bookshop in Mexico City and they gave me Palinuro de Mexico by Fernando del Paso. It's fantastic.
posted by lucia__is__dada at 8:34 AM on January 9

Javier Marias. (To start the best may be: "A Heart so white" or "All Souls")
posted by vega at 8:46 AM on January 9

A. Lobo Antunes and Marías are Iberians... (great writers, though)
posted by lucia__is__dada at 8:53 AM on January 9

BTW, a great blog for keeping up with literature in translation is Three Percent. They have talked a bit about Bonsai by Alejandro Zamba (Chile).
posted by mattbucher at 9:27 AM on January 9

I just finished Dreaming in Cuban by Christina Garcia, and it's absolutely wonderful.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 10:28 AM on January 9

The Movies of My Life and Shorts by Alberto Fuguet. I'm assuming you mean the last ten or twenty years here. Do some reading on McOndo.
posted by el_lupino at 11:19 AM on January 9

A. Lobo Antunes and Marías are Iberians...
oops! Somehow I missed the "American" in Latin American.

Alberto Fuguet, Rodrigo Fresan, Marcelo Birmajer
Jorge Franco, Santiago Gamboa, Laura Restrepo, Fernando Vallejo
posted by vega at 11:45 AM on January 9

Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but I enjoyed The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia very much.
posted by buriednexttoyou at 12:47 PM on January 9

Almost everything I could think of is not translated. Bah... What little I found:

- Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Angelica Gorodischer
- Santa Evita, by Tomas Eloy Martinez
posted by Iosephus at 2:02 PM on January 9

He is not a Latin American author, but rather from Spain. Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind is a phenomenal read.
posted by ezabeta at 3:26 PM on February 10