Affections, by Rodrigo Hasbún (Bolivia) Translated by Sophie Hughes The line between genders begins to collapse in this penetrating, singular meditation on the cost of erasing women from literature and from the world itself. As Amparo moves ever more deeply and strangely into the narrator’s life and consciousness, all manner of borders blur - between cities separated by checkpoints, between past and future, between male and female.
She is an incarnation of Amparo Dávila, a real-life Mexican writer who has been overlooked in literary history. The Iliac Crest, by Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico) Translated by Sarah BookerĪ mysterious woman arrives unannounced at a man’s home. Indiana’s sentences will have you vibrating. Reality and fantasy merge in her mind to form an unrelenting portrait, by turns wrenching, comic, hallucinatory and raw. The narrator is a young girl caught between worlds, growing up in an impoverished neighborhood as she waits for and then is swept up by her rich, dangerous drug dealer of a father. Indiana is a pop musician and queer activist, as well as a writer - all of which shimmers through in this aching thrill ride of a novel. Papi, by Rita Indiana (Dominican Republic) Translated by Achy Obejas Here are six contemporary Latin American novels - all of them slim, all of them brilliant, all of them blowing up boundaries of culture, gender, genre, aesthetics or reality. Today’s real Latin America is vibrant, raucous, infinitely complex and furiously engaged with the cultural and sociopolitical effects of globalization. In terms of literature, it’s an epicenter of innovation, where the gaze is reversed, boundaries explode and the possibilities of our collective past, present and future are boldly reimagined. This is not Gabriel García Márquez ’s fault One Hundred Years of Solitude is a magnificent, ground-shattering novel that deserves every ounce of recognition it receives.
Let’s start with real talk: In the English-speaking world, and above all in the U.S., Latin American literature is all too often pigeonholed, expected to fulfill notions of a quaint, exotic, backward region doling out magical stories.
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