Latin American Boom

“The Latin American Boom (Boom Latinoamericano) was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom is most closely associated with Julio Cortázar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia. Influenced by European and North American Modernism, but also by the Latin American Vanguardia movement, these writers challenged the established conventions of Latin American literature. Their work is experimental and, owing to the political climate of the Latin America of the 1960s, also very political. ‘It is no exaggeration,’ critic Gerald Martin writes, ‘to state that if the Southern continent was known for two things above all others in the 1960s, these were, first and foremost, the Cuban Revolution and its impact both on Latin America and the Third World generally, and secondly, the Boom in Latin American fiction, whose rise and fall coincided with the rise and fall of liberal perceptions of Cuba between 1959 and 1971.’ … In general—and considering there are many countries and hundreds of important authors—at the start of the period, Realism prevails, with novels tinged by an existentialist pessimism, with well-rounded characters lamenting their destinies, and a straightforward narrative line. In the 1960s, language loosens up, gets hip, pop, streetwise, characters are much more complex, and the chronology becomes intricate, making of the reader an active participant in the deciphering of the text. … In The Ends of Literature, Brett Levinson writes that magical realism, ‘a key aesthetic mode within recent Latin American fiction … materializes when Latin American history reveals itself as incapable of accounting for its own origin, an incapacity which traditionally … represents a demand for a myth: mythos as a means to explain the beginnings which escape history’s narrative.’ The writings of the Chroniclers of the Indies depicted the exotic ‘new world’ and their accounts of conquering strange new lands became accepted as history. …”
Wikipedia
W – Magic realism
New Yorker: The Woman Behind Latin America’s Literary Boom
Guide to the Latin American Boom
Avon Bard Latin America
Looking Back on 50 Years of Latin American Literary Rock Stars
These are the Latin American authors you should be reading this summer

[From left to right] Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa