100 Books Like Pedro Páramo

I don’t think Garcia Marquez needs a review or introduction. Reading any of his books is a pleasure, with easy and delightful writing and striking sentences.

These sentences often describe things or people in a way that feels natural and perfectly captured. For instance, he describes the world as so new that many things lack names. His eloquent descriptions, like that of ice, create vivid images. The characters are relatable, and you feel a happy exhaustion after finishing the book, reminiscent of great works like Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Those who find the stories too unbelievable should learn about Colombian history, as they provide real context. I simply love the book!

I am not a fan of fantasy, but this is magical realism at its best. Not too much, not too little, just enough to remind everyone that the spirits are still working on behalf of true love and goodness and that justice prevails despite all obstacles…like a fairy tale with complications. Just my cup of tea. 

How realistic is it that food transmits any emotions the cook may be feeling while making the food? This idea captivated me immediately; it was something I had never thought about. And yet, growing up in my family, women always made the food. So again, a very female tale.

In the beginning, Tita, the heroine, is passionate and in love, but she succumbs to tradition and rejects true love and passion to submit to tradition, which dictates she takes care of her mother. In time, Tita learns to disobey the injustice of that tradition… show more.

As both a novelist and a monk whose life focuses on blending the material and spiritual, I consider this a very important work. Despite a privileged Jewish upbringing in New York City, Latin culture has forever been an important part of my life. The fact is, I’ve always been surrounded by South American friends and spent time in South America in my teen years.

This book brings to life the mystical heart of so much that drives South American culture, revealing it in a way that pulls you straight into the arms of a parallel world, or if not parallel, then one that exists both above and below what we superficially see and feel. I find it a great read and one that remains alive in my imagination year after year.

“What is this?” I asked myself on first reading. “Fiction?”

Each short piece contained a moving story that was like a jewel to view and think about, but something was strange, in a wondrous way. It seemed like fiction posing as journalism, like the great classical Chinese tale “A Record of the Peach Blossom Land” by Tao Yuanming (6th century) that inspired my most popular play.

It upended my concept of short story, and of art, opening doors to ways of writing. “Fiction in disguise.” Astonishingly creative, yet peaceful and profound. Wildly creative themes and twists narrated by a quiet objective voice. Maestro Borges taught me that you can shock an audience through very calm narrative, and how profound creativity starts with format.

A master class in creativity that ends with compassion.

As the title suggests, this book lingers like a disquieting dream. A mother to a toddler myself, I think of what the protagonist Amanda calls the “rescue distance” often – the ground between herself and her child, should something perilous occur.

This book distills maternal protectiveness and anxiety into something as potent as poison or as powerful as a curse. It makes me want to look over my shoulder, lock the doors, draw the blinds. It carries an air of contagion. I can think of few other reads that evoke such a visceral reaction with such subtle strokes.

Horrifying, brutal, sinuous, and uncanny, this one floored me. It evokes the peril of girlhood and womanhood with unwavering intensity.

Each story is fresh and unexpected, yet also timeless, rich with wisdom and mythology centuries old. Steeped in painful history, past atrocities twine with the present to nightmarish effect.

Mariana Enríquez is part of a new vanguard of Argentine and Latin American Gothic writers alongside Samanta Schweblin. Their writing, born from real-world horrors, is among the most thrilling discoveries I’ve made in years. 

The Kingdom of this World is written by a Cuban writer and pits two worldviews against each other—the Afro-Haitian and the French.

This short novel is set at the end of the eighteenth century in Haiti, and the French are trying to maintain control of their colonies in the Caribbean. We see these different world views from both points of view so that the same event can have disastrously different meanings.

We follow the Haitian slave, Ti Noel, who reports on “magical” happenings that stem from his Haitian belief in shape-shifting: men can take flight if necessary, or transform themselves into animals or insects, or otherwise do what the French consider “magic” and the Haitians consider normal. We see events from the French point of view of Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon and wife of a French general who was sent to Haiti to put down the slave revolt. 

As… show more.

I was given this as a present and what a wonderful present it was. Deborah Turbeville is a wonderful photographer whose work I admire. Her fashion photography was innovative, imaginative and so creative.

This book, a visual diary of her house and time in Mexico is filled with her signature blurred images, from black and white portraits to colourful interiors. It goes against everything we learn in Interiors but it’s magical, evocative, and gothic.

I read The Brick People when it was first published in 1988.

At the time, I was already familiar with Morales’ work, but this historical novel about the Simons Brick Factory in Southern California and the Mexican migrants who the Simons brother depended upon for their success seized my imagination.

The author blends folklore, history, myth, and magical realism into a novel that relates the story of Mexican migrants and their complicity with or rebellion against the Simons brothers and the mores of the early 20th Century Los Angeles region.

Morales shows how history from the ground up is manifested in people’s lives.  His characters work and play hard as they seek to build community and pursue dreams of social mobility even when customs and laws prohibit them.

The Mexican Revolution was photographed by many photographers, foreigners as well as Mexicans, whose photographs were collected by news agencies and distributed immediately in newspapers, sometimes even as the fighting was going on. Their photos record defining moments in Mexico’s history, and offer portraits of its participants: soldiers and camp followers (women and children), as well as iconic leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, among others. 

I love this book because it is written by a woman who lived her whole life in Mexico, experienced events of the Revolution, and knew many of its participants. Her personal account is accompanied by 184 photos that enhance her text and make events and people come alive.

The importance of this Revolution cannot be exaggerated. It engulfed much of Mexico for at least two decades (1910-1930), and claimed between 2 and 3.5 million lives. Troops advanced on horseback and trains, in dusty fields… show more.