The Latin American Boom

The Boom is not a school but a publishing moment: in the sixties a handful of Latin American novelists were translated everywhere at once, often out of Barcelona, and ceased to be read as regional curiosities. They shared the ambition of the total novel, able to swallow a continent, and a taste for devious forms, broken time, multiple narrators, as in Roa Bastos's Yo el Supremo or Cabrera Infante's Tres tristes tigres. Behind the literary success stands a generation writing under dictatorships and from exile.

works 8

• NovelA Brief LifeLa vida breveJuan Carlos Onetti · 1950Buenos Aires around 1950, where a man whose life is threatened splits himself in two by inventing a city.Literature
• NovelCoronationCoronaciónJosé Donoso · 1957A bedridden grandmother, an idle grandson, ageing maids and a young peasant girl in a closed-up house.Literature
• Short storiesLas armas secretasJulio Cortázar · 1959not translated into EnglishFive stories, most of them in Paris, in which a letter, a photograph or an appointment opens onto something else.Literature
• NovelThe Death of Artemio CruzLa muerte de Artemio CruzCarlos Fuentes · 1962The last hours of a revolutionary turned magnate, who looks back over a life of betrayals.Literature
• NovelThree Trapped TigersTres tristes tigresGuillermo Cabrera Infante · 1967The cabarets and nights of Havana, at the end of the fifties.Literature
• NovelI the SupremeYo el SupremoAugusto Roa Bastos · 1974The country's first dictator, trapped by his own dictation, in a fragmented form that questions the writing of power.Literature
• NovelAunt Julia and the ScriptwriterLa tía Julia y el escribidorMario Vargas Llosa · 1977The Lima of popular radio and of high society: a novel that mixes a youthful love with the parody of melodrama.Literature
• NovelChronicle of a Death ForetoldCrónica de una muerte anunciadaGabriel García Márquez · 1981Two brothers announce everywhere the murder they are preparing, and an entire town lets it happen.Literature