PagineMagical realism, labyrinths, love poems and dictator novels: Latin American classics changed world literature in the 20th century. Here are 64 essential books from South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean — from Sor Juana and Machado de Assis to the “Boom” of García Márquez, Cortázar and Vargas Llosa — with short guides to the great Latin American authors, where to start, and where to read or borrow them free.
New to Latin American literature? Begin with one of these — or follow our step-by-step guide, What to Read for Latin American Classics →
Short biographies, what to read first, and every book of theirs on this list.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, called “the Tenth Muse,” was the greatest poet of colonial Spanish America. A child prodigy at the viceroy’s court in Mexico City, she became a nun largely so she could study, building one of the largest libraries in the Americas. Her poems — from the satirical “Hombres necios” to the long philosophical First Dream — and her Reply to Sor Filotea (1691), a brilliant defence of women’s right to learn, make her an early feminist icon. She appears on Mexico’s banknotes.
Where to start: Reply to Sor Filotea
On this list: First Dream · Reply to Sor Filotea
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the grandson of freed slaves, was born in a Rio de Janeiro hillside slum, largely taught himself, and became Brazil’s greatest writer and the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His ironic, playful novels were decades ahead of their time: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) is narrated by a dead man, and Dom Casmurro (1899) leaves readers still arguing whether Capitu was unfaithful. Susan Sontag and Philip Roth championed him in English.
Where to start: Dom Casmurro
On this list: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas · Quincas Borba · Dom Casmurro
Rubén Darío of Nicaragua founded modernismo, the first literary movement to travel from Latin America to Spain rather than the other way round. His book Azul… (1888) brought a new music and freedom to Spanish poetry and prose; Prosas profanas (1896) and Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905) confirmed him as the “prince of Spanish letters.”
Where to start: Azul
On this list: Azul
Horacio Quiroga, a Uruguayan who spent years in the jungle of Misiones in northern Argentina, is the father of the Latin American short story. His Tales of Love, Madness and Death (1917) are dark, Poe-like masterpieces, while South American Jungle Tales (1918), stories of animals of the rainforest written for his children, are still read by young people across the region.
Where to start: South American Jungle Tales
On this list: Tales of Love, Madness and Death · South American Jungle Tales
Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy Alcayaga) was a rural schoolteacher from Chile’s Elqui Valley who became the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. Her poetry — Desolation (1922), Tenderness and Felling — speaks of love, loss, motherhood and children; she also helped reform education in Mexico and served as a diplomat. She appears on Chile’s 5,000-peso note.
Where to start: Desolation
On this list: Desolation
Jorge Luis Borges wrote no novels, yet his short stories changed literature everywhere. In Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949) he imagined an infinite library, a map as large as the empire, a man who remembers everything, and labyrinths of time — ideas that anticipated the internet and inspired writers from García Márquez to Umberto Eco. He became director of Argentina’s National Library in 1955, just as he was going blind.
Where to start: Ficciones
On this list: Ficciones · The Aleph
Pablo Neruda published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) at 19; it became one of the best-selling poetry books in Spanish. A diplomat and Communist senator, he wrote the epic Canto General (1950), a history of the Americas in verse, and the playful Odes to Common Things — to tomatoes, socks and onions. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and died twelve days after the 1973 military coup in Chile.
Where to start: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
On this list: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair · Canto General
Juan Rulfo published just two slim books, and both are classics. The Burning Plain (1953) gathers stories of rural Jalisco after the Mexican Revolution; Pedro Páramo (1955) follows a man searching for his father in a village of whispering ghosts. García Márquez said he knew it by heart, and it opened the way to magical realism. Rulfo was also an accomplished photographer.
Where to start: Pedro Páramo
On this list: The Burning Plain · Pedro Páramo
Julio Cortázar, an Argentine born in Brussels who lived most of his adult life in Paris, wrote playful, unsettling stories in which the strange slips into everyday life — “House Taken Over,” “Axolotl,” and “Blow-Up,” filmed by Antonioni. His novel Hopscotch (1963) can be read straight through or by jumping between chapters in a different order, and became a landmark of the Latin American Boom.
Where to start: Blow-Up and Other Stories
On this list: Hopscotch · Blow-Up and Other Stories
Gabriel García Márquez, known as Gabo, grew up with his grandparents in the Colombian town of Aracataca, listening to his grandmother tell impossible things in a perfectly calm voice. That voice became magical realism. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo, sold tens of millions of copies; Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) followed. A journalist all his life, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
Reading order: Start with Chronicle of a Death Foretold or No One Writes to the Colonel (both short), then One Hundred Years of Solitude — keep a family tree handy — and Love in the Time of Cholera.
On this list: No One Writes to the Colonel · One Hundred Years of Solitude · The Autumn of the Patriarch · Chronicle of a Death Foretold · Love in the Time of Cholera
Mario Vargas Llosa burst onto the scene with The Time of the Hero (1963), set in a Lima military academy, and became one of the giants of the Boom with Conversation in the Cathedral (1969), The War of the End of the World (1981) and The Feast of the Goat (2000), about the Dominican dictator Trujillo. He ran for president of Peru in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010.
Where to start: The Feast of the Goat
On this list: The Time of the Hero · Conversation in the Cathedral · The War of the End of the World · The Feast of the Goat
Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read Spanish-language authors alive. A journalist who left Chile after the 1973 coup that overthrew her father’s cousin, President Salvador Allende, she began The House of the Spirits (1982) as a letter to her dying grandfather; the saga of the Trueba family became an international bestseller. She has written more than twenty books, including Eva Luna and Paula.
Where to start: The House of the Spirits
On this list: The House of the Spirits
1 of these is free to read in Pagine right now (📖 Read free). The rest link to a free public-domain edition or to Open Library, where many can be borrowed free.
Print it, save it as a PDF, email it to yourself or share it with a friend, book club or class. Every copy links back to pagineapp.com, and the free Pagine app tracks every book you finish.
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AndroidEvery title on the list links to the free sources that may have it. Public-domain books are free to read and download; newer books can often be borrowed free.
Magical realism tells impossible things — a girl who rises to heaven while folding sheets, a rain that lasts four years — in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, as part of everyday life. Its roots run through Rulfo, Carpentier (who wrote of “the marvellous real”) and Asturias, and it reached the world with García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Most 20th-century Latin American classics are still under copyright, so we link to Open Library, where many can be borrowed free. Older works such as María and Quiroga’s tales are in the public domain. Practise Spanish or Portuguese in our language corner, and track every book in the free Pagine app.
Short books are the best way in: Borges’s Ficciones, Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Then try One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In the 1960s and 70s a generation of writers — Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes — won worldwide readership for Latin American fiction with experimental, ambitious novels.
Gabriela Mistral (1945), Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967), Pablo Neruda (1971), Gabriel García Márquez (1982), Octavio Paz (1990) and Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), plus Derek Walcott (1992) from the Caribbean.
Older works such as María, The Underdogs and Quiroga’s South American Jungle Tales are in the public domain. Most 20th-century classics are still under copyright; Open Library and your public library lend many of them free.
Yes. Brazil writes in Portuguese, and Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Guimarães Rosa and Mário de Andrade are among the greatest Latin American writers.
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