Post-Boom Literature Classics

Post-Boom Latin American Literature

The Latin American Boom and Post-Boom Literature Classics are on Display at Boston College Libraries.

Latin American Fiction since the 1960s to today.

“The Latin American Boom was a literary movement in the 1960s and 70s. It originated when the works of predominantly male Latin American authors like Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez became wildly circulated throughout Europe, particularly in Paris and Barcelona.

Influenced by Mondernism and the Vanguadia movement, the works of the Boom authors were highly experimental: time was often treated as a nonlinear object; perspectives were juxtaposed by accounts of multiple, and frequently contradicting, voices. reality was oftentimes distorted by the presence of surreal, fantastical elements. Additionally, the works of the Boom authors were deeply influenced by the tempestuous Latin American political landscape of the 1960’s, particularly by the Cuban Revolution and the proliferation of military regimes in South America.

The Post-Boom started in the 1980’s. It was different from the Boom in many aspects, most notably in that the Post-Boom had a strong presence of female authors. post-Boom authors such as Isabel Allende, Roberto Bolaño, Cristina Peri Rossi, Elena Poniatowska, Severo Sarduy, Manuel Puig, Luisa Valenzuela, and Giannina Braschi, rejected the Boom’s experimental approach. Instead, they embraced a simpler, more approachable narrative.”

Source: Boston College Libraries.

Yo-Yo Boing!

This iconic Spanglish novel by the leading Hispanic-American poet Giannina Braschi was heralded…as “in your face assertion of the vitality of Latino culture in the United States.” It is also a very funny novel, a novel of argumentative conversations that cover food, movies, literature, art, the academy, sex, memory, and every day life. It is a book that should be performed as well as read.

Boston College Libraries: Boom and Post-Boom

2666

Roberto Bolaño’s throng of characters includes academics and convicts, and American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally and stable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa, a fictional Juarez on the US México border, where hundreds of factory workers, the novel as in life, disappear.

Boston College Libraries: Boom and Post-Boom

Boston College Libraries features these Boom and Post-Boom literature classics on virtual display:

• Cobra — Severo Sarduy (1972)
• 2666 — Roberto Bolaño (2004)
• Mr. President — Miguel Ángel Asturias (1946)
• Conversation in the Cathedral — Mario Vargas Llosa (1969)
• Kiss of the Spider Woman — Manuel Puig (1976)
• Strange Things Happen Here — Luisa Valenzuela (1975)
• Blow-Up — Julio Cortázar (1959)
• The Angel of Darkness — Ernesto Sábato (1974)
• Hopscotch — Julio Cortázar (1963)
• The Burning Plain — Juan Rulfo (1953)
• Paradiso — José Lezama Lima (1966)
• The Obscene Bird of Night — José Donoso (1970)
• The House of the Spirits — Isabel Allende (1982)
• View of Dawn in the Tropics — Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1974)
• Yo-Yo Boing! — Giannina Braschi (1998)
• State of Exile — Cristina Peri Rossi (2003)
• Lilus Kikus — Elena Poniatowska (1954)
• The Shipyard — Juan Carlos Onetti (1961)

Research Post-Boom Novels

Academic References on Contemporary Latin American Literature