18 Best Caribbean & Latin American Books

In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her cronicas–short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces–are the delicious canapes.

“The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.”

The cronica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers, or even soccer stars, to address a wide readership on any theme they like.

Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love.

This new, beautifully translated work presents a new aspect of the great writer–at once off the cuff and spot on.

More than a hundred years after his birth, Pablo Neruda’s poetry is as vital and beloved as ever.

This collection presents fifty of the most essential poems by one of history’s greatest poets in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration among a team of poets, translators, and the world’s leading Neruda scholars.

A definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth of Neruda’s various styles, themes, and periods, The Essential Neruda breathes new life and understanding into the world of one of Latin America’s–and the world’s–treasures.

Mas de cien anos despues de su nacimiento, la poesia de Pablo Neruda es tan vital y querida como siempre.

Esta coleccion presenta cincuenta poemas esenciales de uno de los mas grandes poetas de la historia en nuevas traducciones dinamicas, fruto de una colaboracion sin precedentes entre un equipo de poetas, traductores y los principales eruditos del mundo.

Una seleccion definitiva que se basa en toda la amplitud de los diferentes estilos, temas y periodos de Neruda. El Neruda esencial da vida y comprension al mundo de uno de los tesoros de America Latina y del mundo.

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin’s empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book.

According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”

Vincent Toro’s new collection takes the Latin American idea of an artistic social gathering (the tertulia) and revises
it for the Latinx context in the United States. In verses dense with juxtaposition, these poems examine immigration,
economics, colonialism, and race via the sublime imagery of music, visual art, and history. Toro draws from his own
social justice work in various U.S. cities to create a kaleidoscopic vision of the connections between the personal
and the political, the local and the global, in a book that both celebrates and questions the complexities of the
human condition.

For fans of the Netflix show Narcos and readers of true crime, Kilo is a deeply reported account of life inside Colombia’s drug cartels, using unprecedented access in the cartels to trace a kilo of cocaine–from the fields where it is farmed, to the hit men who protect it, to the smuggling ships that bring it to American shores.

“Toby Muse’s tautly written account of his intimate prowl through Colombia’s narco world is both compelling and unforgettable. With Kilo, cocaine now has its own Dispatches. Simply kickass.”

— Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

Cocaine is glamour, sex and murder. From the badlands of Colombia, it stretches across the globe, seducing, corrupting and destroying. A product that must be produced, distributed, and protected, it is both a harbinger of violence and a source of immense wealth. Beginning in the jungles and mountains of Colombia, it filters down to countryside villages and the nightclubs of the cities, attracting money, sex, and death. Each step in the life of a kilo reveals a different criminal underworld with its own players, rules, and dangers, ranging from the bizarre to the diabolical. The killers, the drug-lords, all find themselves seduced by cocaine and trapped in her world.

Seasoned war correspondent Toby Muse has witnessed each level of this underworld, fueled by the appetite for cocaine in America and Europe. In this riveting chronicle, he takes the reader inside Colombia’s notorious drug cartels to offer a never before look at the drug trade. Following a kilo of cocaine from its production in a clandestine laboratory to the smugglers who ship it abroad, he reveals the human lives behind the drug’s complicated legacy. Reporting on Colombia for the world’s most prestigious networks and publications, Muse gained unprecedented access to the extraordinary people who survive on the drug trade–farmers, smugglers, assassins–and the drug lords and their lovers controlling these multi-billion dollar enterprises. Uncovering stories of violence, sex, and money, he shows the allure and the madness of cocaine. And how the War on Drugs has been no match for cocaine.

Piercing this veiled world, Kilo is a gripping portrait of a country struggling to end this deadly trade even as the riches flow. A human portrait of criminals and the shocking details of their lives, Kilo is a chilling, unforgettable story that takes you deep into the belly of the beast.

Sensual, earthy love poems that formed the basis for the popular movie Il Postino, now in a beautiful gift book perfect for weddings, Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, or just to say “I love you!”

Charged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda’s love poems are the most celebrated of the Nobel Prize winner’s oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images and reveling in a fiery reimagining of the world. Mostly written on the island paradise of Capri (the idyllic setting of the Oscar-winning movie Il Postino), Love Poems embraces the seascapes surrounding the poet and his love, Matilde Urrutia, their waves and shores saturated with a new, yearning eroticism.

Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, finished writing The Captain’s Verses in 1952 while in exile on the island of Capri–the paradisiacal setting for the blockbuster film Il Postino (The Postman). Surrounded by sea, sun, and Capri’s natural splendors, Neruda addressed these poems to his lover Matilde Urrutia before they were married, but he didn’t publish them publicly until 1963. This complete collection has become a classic for love-struck readers around the world–passionately sensuous and exploding with all the erotic energy of a new love.

Cargados de sensualidad y pasion, los poemas de amor de Pablo Neruda son los mas celebres de la obra del premio Nobel, cautivando a los lectores con imagenes terrestres y disfrutando de un fuego re-imaginacion del mundo. Sobre todo por escrito en la paradisiaca isla de Capri (el entorno idilico de la pelicula ganadora del Oscar Il Postino) Poemas de amor abraza los marinos circundantes el poeta y su amor Matilde Urrutia, sus ondas y costas saturados con un nuevo erotismo anhelo .

The internationally acclaimed last work by the legendary Latin American writer

Master storyteller Eduardo Galeano was unique among his contemporaries (Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa among them) for his commitment to retelling our many histories, including the stories of those who were disenfranchised. A philosopher poet, his nonfiction is infused with such passion and imagination that it matches the intensity and the appeal of Latin America’s very best fiction.

Comprised of all new material, published here for the first time in a wonderful English translation by longtime collaborator Mark Fried, Hunter of Stories is a deeply considered collection of Galeano’s final musings and stories on history, memory, humor, and tragedy. Written in his signature style — vignettes that fluidly combine dialogue, fables, and anecdotes — every page displays the original thinking and compassion that has earned Galeano decades and continents of renown.

One of the most acclaimed and revered Nobel laureates begins to tell us the story of his life.

Living to Tell the Tale spans Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s life from his birth in 1927 through the start of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the shape, the quality, and the vividness of a conversation with the reader–a tale of people, places, and events as they occur to him: the colorful stories of his eccentric family members; the great influence of his mother and maternal grandfather; his consuming career in journalism, and the friends and mentors who encouraged him; the myths and mysteries of his beloved Colombia; personal details, undisclosed until now, that would appear later, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction; and, above all, his fervent desire to become a writer. And, as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at the heart of a life–in this instance, his own.

Living to Tell the Tale is a radiant, powerful, and beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a writer and as a man.

Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor and wisdom, The Sum of Our Days is a portrait of a contemporary family, tied together by the love, strong will, and stubborn determination of a beloved matriarch, the indomitable New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende.

“An inspiring and thought-provoking work.” –Denver Post

Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory–and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award * Winner of the Orange Prize * National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

“Bel Canto is its own universe. A marvel of a book.” —Washington Post Book World

New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s spellbinding novel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn to communicate across cultural barriers in times of crisis

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening–until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Patchett’s lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.

Spanning politics and art, music and baseball, Cuba on the Verge is a timely look at a society’s profound transformation–from inside and out.

Change looms in Cuba.

Just ninety miles from United States shores yet inaccessible to most Americans until recently, Cuba fascinates as much as it confounds. Images of the Buena Vista Social Club, wild nights at the Tropicana, classic cars, and bearded rebels clinching cigars only scrape the surface of Cuba’s complex history and legacy. As the US and Cuba move toward the normalization of diplomatic relations after an epic fifty-six-year standoff, we find ourselves face-to-face with one of the few places in the world that has been off limits to most Americans. We know that Cuba is changing, but from what and into what? And what does this change mean for the Cuban people as well as for the rest of the world?

Standing on both sides of the divide, twelve of our most celebrated writers investigate this period of momentous transition in Cuba on the Verge. These essays span the spectrum, from Carlos Manuel Alvarez’s story of being among the last generation of Cubans to be raised under Fidel Castro to Patricia Engel’s look at how Cuba’s capital has changed through her years of riding across it with her taxi driver friend; from The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson (who traveled with President Obama on the first trip to Cuba by an American president since the twenties) on being a foreigner in Cuba during the Special Period to Francisco Goldman on the Tropicana, then and now, to Leonardo Padura on the religion that is Cuban baseball.

Cuba on the Verge is the definitive account of–and a unique glimpse at–a moment of upheaval and reinvention whose effects promise to reverberate across years and nations.

When the Spanish government declared war against the United States in 1898, Theodore Roosevelt resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to take his place as lieutenant colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. His involvement with this unit, nicknamed The Rough Riders, established “Teddy” as a household name. The Rough Riders is the future president’s account of his experiences and of the Spanish-American War.

Weaving fiction with fact, fantastic matter with historical figures, Borges’ frequent theme of a world where time, culture, and place converge is both timely and pertinent in our advance toward globalization. Drawing from his multi-ethnic and -lingual upbringing in Argentina, Borges’ focus on universal themes early on came to belittle the sentiments of racism and communism, earning him widespread recognition. His work is both timeless and touching, a product of deep suffering and incorrigible innocence.

Borges in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Borges’ life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man’s struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes a list of Borges’ chief works, a chronology of his life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders.

Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutierrez’s debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutierrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds.

Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutierrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity,
and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.

Expansivo recuento de los diversos, creativos, frecuentemente extranos y sin embargo increiblemente inquietantes intentos de asesinar a Fidel Castro.

Fabian Escalante, el fundador de los servicios de seguridad cubanos y jefe del Departamento de Seguridad del Estado Cubano provee un lucido recuento en primera persona de sus experiencias defendiendo a Castro contra extraordinarios intentos de homicidio. Escrito en el estilo de una novela de suspenso politico, pero lleno de detalles historicos sobre Fidel, Cuba, el movimiento comunista y los intentos de Estados Unidos de silenciar la rebelion, este libro clarifica los peligros inherentes que conlleva luchar por un mundo mejor.
634 maneras de matar a Fidel ilumina la amenaza que Castro y el movimiento revolucionario cubano presentaban para la hegemonia estadounidense. El resultado es un inquietante retrato de como los impuestos de ciudadanos estadounidenses financian campanas para reprimir el disentimiento e intentar quebrar movimientos en el Sur Global que luchan por la soberania, la justicia, la autodeterminacion y, basicamente, un mundo mejor.

“Planes de asesinato concebidos contra Fidel Castro a lo largo de muchos anos involucraron armas tales como venenos letales, potentes explosivos plasticos, cigarros conteniendo sustancias peligrosas, granadas a lanzar en espacios publicos, armas con telescopios sofisticados, jeringas llenas de veneno con agujas tan finas que el contacto con la piel pasaria desapercibido, lanzadores de misiles y bazucas, y cargas explosivas escondidas en canos bajo tierra con un temporizador contando los minutos y segundos hasta la explosion.”