This month, we are celebrating authors of Hispanic heritage. From the forgotten history found again in El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America to a Chicano teenager’s coming-of-age story in The Flowers, this list highlights some of our favorite books featuring Hispanic characters and stories. Whether you’re looking for a riveting and propulsive novel, insightful poetry, or an in-depth history, these eleven unforgettable books showcase the beauty and strength of the Hispanic community.

 

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America by Carrie Gibson

El Norte chronicles the sweeping and dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century to the present—from Ponce de Leon’s initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico. In this stirring and eventful history, Carrie Gibson powerfully impacts our national understanding.

“This is history as dialogue. It leaves the mourning authority of archives and takes its place as a long conversation, presupposing that truth can be reached through an extended pilgrimage, a journey through violence, discrimination, racism, exploitation, and the inferno created by occupation.”—Julio Ortega, New York Times Book Review

 

Gordo by Jaime Cortez

In his debut collection of short stories Gordo, Jaime Cortez is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. Shedding profound natural light on the inner lives of migrant workers, Jaime Cortez’s collection ushers in a new era of American literature that gives voice to a marginalized generation of migrant workers in the West.

“Intimate and irreverent… This hilarious short story collection gives incisive glimpses of blue-collar Mexican American life.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

 

 

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

Don’t miss the film adaptation coming to Netflix on November 6, 2024.

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century.

“Pedro Páramo is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century’s books.”—Susan Sontag

 

Paradise by Elena Castedo

In this ingenious satire, Solita, the not quite ten-year-old daughter of refugees from Franco’s Spain, is whisked from the urban ghetto of Galmeda to El Topaz, the lush hacienda of a wealthy eccentric, which her mother assures her will be paradise. But behind its beautiful façade, El Topaz is a quagmire of social subterfuge, from its politicking adults to its spiteful children, and Solita finds herself alone in a glittery world where “you couldn’t trust anything. Or anybody. You had to navigate completely on your own.”

“A fascinating and wonderfully different novel, one that forms a harmonious blend of two rich and fertile literary traditions, Latin America’s and our own.”—Washington Times

 

The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings by Octavio Paz

Mexico’s foremost writer and critic, Octavio Paz, has created an international classic and one of the most enduring and powerful works ever created on Mexico and its people, character, and culture. A beautifully written and deeply felt discourse, The Labyrinth of Solitude explores Mexico’s quest for identity that gives us an unequalled look at the country hidden behind “the mask.”

“The Labyrinth of Solitude is essential to an understanding of [Mexico] and, by extension, Latin America.”—The Village Voice

 

How to Draw a Novel by Martín Solares

In this finely wrought collection of essays, Martín Solares examines the novel in all its forms, exploring the conventions of structure, the novel as a house that one must build brick by brick, and the objects and characters that build out the world of the novel in unique and complex ways. A novelist, occasional scholar, and former acquiring editor in Mexican publishing, Solares breaks out of the Anglo-American-dominated canon of many craft books, ranging across Latin and South America as well.

“How to Draw a Novel is an imaginative examination of the art of novel writing that is thought provoking and invigorating in equal measure.”—Ho Lin, New York Journal of Books

 

Vida by Patricia Engel

Vida follows a single narrator, Sabina, as she navigates her shifting identity as a daughter of the Colombian diaspora and struggles to find her place within and beyond the net of her strong, protective, but embattled family. Infused by a hard-won, edgy wisdom, Vida introduces a sensational new literary voice.

“Gloriously gifted and alarmingly intelligent, Patricia Engel writes with an almost fable-like intensity . . . Here, friends, is the debut I have been waiting for.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

 

The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb

Sonny Bravo is a tender, smart Mexican American who has come to live at the Flowers, where he moved when his troubled and too beautiful mother Silvia remarried an Okie contractor named Cloyd Longpre. As Sonny observes a miniaturized world of prejudice at the Flowers, the neighborhood he lives in explodes with racial violence—and Sonny does what he can to save what’s good in his world. Dagoberto Gilb, in his most commanding work yet, has written an inspiring novel about the want for love that transcends age, race, and time.

“The prospect of reading a novel narrated in run-on sentences, fragments, Spanish phrases and street slang might seem daunting, but not when you meet the precocious, Holden Caufieldesque narrator of Dagoberto Gilb’s coming-of-age novel . . . Sonny’s voice is mesmeric. It keeps us reading.”—Sarah Fay, New York Times

 

Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman

A novel of enormous achievement, Monkey Boy tells the tale of Francisco Goldberg, a middle-aged writer who grapples with the challenges of family and love, legacies of violence and war, and growing up Guatemalan and Jewish in America. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the American Book Award, Monkey Boy is a new masterpiece of fiction from one of the most important American voices in the last forty years.

“An autofictional inquiry into the protean nature of identity, written with disarming candor and grace, blending memory and imagination to transformational effect.”—Pulitzer Prize Committee

 

Woodcuts of Women by Dagoberto Gilb

Ten moving and heartbreaking stories of lust, love, and longing among men and women struggling to find their way in the world, crafted with Gilb’s trademark spare, humid language, and infused with poetic, aching beauty. At turns powerful and resonant, hopeful and humorous, Woodcuts of Women is a tour de force by one of America’s foremost Latino writers.

“Woodcuts of Women portrays men in the brightness of rage, lousy jobs, divine lust, and, especially, in the dazed sucker punch of love . . . Here is the Southwest without myth and sentimentality. And here are los hombres with all their bravado and hungry hurt.” —Sandra Cisneros

 

Healing Earthquakes by Jimmy Santiago Baca

From Indio-Mexican author and poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, Healing Earthquakes uses poetry to conjure a romance from beginning to end. We are privy to the couple’s astonishing range of emotions: the anguish of loneliness, the heady rush of new love, the irritation, and joys of raising children, the difficulties in truly knowing someone, and the doldrums of breakup. This is an extraordinary work from one of our finest poets.

“Jimmy Santiago Baca is a force in American poetry. Now, with Healing Earthquakes, he has accomplished its grand result in a book of brilliant passion. His words heal, inspire, and elicit the earthy response of love.”—Garrett Hongo