Book Recomendations

Hello all, I'm looking for some recommendations for good books by Latin American authors. I've started to read a couple of Roberto Bolaño's books, Mario Bellatin's Beauty Salon and Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai (among a few others) and have fallen in love with Latin American literature. So please, give me your favorites.

English translations if possible :)

For Argentine writers, I like
Ricardo Piglia: Artificial Respiration
Roberto Arlt: Seven Madmen
Any Jorge Luis Borges
Adolfo Bioy Casares:Invention of Morel
Cesar Aira: Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
Tomas Eloy Martinez

others I like
Alejo Carpentier : The Lost Steps
Fernando del Paso: Palinuro of Mexico
Horacio Quiroga: Decapitated Chicken

Magical realism is well embodied by its leader Gabriel Garcia Marquez; One hundred years of solitude is a must-read on the discovery path of Latin American literature - but maybe a bit too obvious for what you are looking for.

Many others writers and personal favorite include (to name just a few) Álvaro Mutis from Columbia (all the adventures of Maqroll) or the Peruvian Alfredo Bryce Echenique - Tarzan's Tonsillitis is great!

Enjoy your reading!

The Piglia and Arlt books Colukben mentions are favorites of mine as well. Personally I prefer Mario Vargas Llosa as a fiction writer to Garcia Marquez--though I'm more in tune with GM's political stances than MVL's. Conversation in the Cathedral is a fantastic book IMO.

Three other Argentines I'd mention--Ernesto Sabato's On heroes and tombs and The angel of darkness--Mempo Giardinelli and Enrique Medina. Garcia Marquez's buddy Alvaro Mutis and his Adventures of Maqroll are quite interesting as well.

Bolano is a fantastic writer. Going the poetry route the Chilean Nicanor Parra is IMO as good as it gets.

I created this thread and apparently instantly forgot about it.

Thanks for the recommendations everyone, I will have to check them out!

with Tomas Eloy Martinez- i really liked The Peron Novel

!00 Greatest Spanish Novels

http://splalit.blogspot.com/2007/03/100-best-novels-written-in-spanish-in.html

prior list of 100 titles

in the last 25 years

I wholeheartedly concur with the recommendations of On heroes and tombs and The lost steps. Both those books mean a lot to me, and I've read them multiple times, finding new reasons to admire them each time.

A few that I've read (or re-read in the case of the books by Onetti and Rulfo) somewhat recently and enjoyed:

Felisberto Hernández--the books La casa inundada and Por los tiempos de Clemente Colling, much of which has been translated in the collection Lands of Memory.
José María Argüedas--Los ríos profundos, translated under the title of Deep Rivers
Juan Carlos Onetti--La vida breve, translated under the title of A Brief Life
Juan Rulfo--Pedro Páramo and El llano en llamas

I read an article comparing Rulfo to J.D. Salinger in that they're both authors whose importance greatly outweighs the relative brevity of their complete works. Both of his books are fundamental in the history of the literature of Latin America. Onetti is my personal fave, at least in a flavor-of-the-month sort of way (although he'll always be high on my list).

a great list of spanish novels from 1982 to present - while some are by Spaniards many are by latin Americans.

http://conversationalreading.com/top-25-spanish-language-novels-written-since-19...

asturias