New Latin American fiction
January 9, 2009 7:23 AM   Subscribe

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 answers total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
posted by mattbucher at 7:59 AM on January 9, 2009


What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? by Antonio Lobo Antunes
posted by ocherdraco at 8:03 AM on January 9, 2009


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, 2009


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, 2009


A. Lobo Antunes and Marías are Iberians... (great writers, though)
posted by lucia__is__dada at 8:53 AM on January 9, 2009


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, 2009


I just finished Dreaming in Cuban by Christina Garcia, and it's absolutely wonderful.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 10:28 AM on January 9, 2009


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, 2009


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, 2009


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, 2009


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, 2009


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, 2009


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