Argentina

“Antonio di Benedetto is rather less well-known than some of his American contemporaries…It’s the story of an official, a former chief administrator, Don Diego de Zama, in an outpost of the Spanish Empire in the late 1700s, who is seeking advancement and reposting that will enable him to reunite with his wife and children…He’s also a very unattractive character…He’s desperately flawed, amoral and ever unsuccessful.” Read more...

The Best Book-to-Movie Adaptations

Peter Markham, Film Director

“Personally, I’m particularly excited about Our Share of Night by the Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez, who was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 for her utterly unsettling collection of literary ghost stories The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. This new novel, also translated into English by Megan McDowell, is a gothic horror set partly during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, but which also embraces elements of occultism and the supernatural. Clocking in at more than 700 pages, this is an intimidating tome that simply pulsates with negative energy. That’s a recommendation, in case I’m not being clear.” Read more...

Notable New Novels of Fall 2022

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“This is a Granta book that came out in the mid-1990s by an Argentinian-Irish journalist and it’s an excellent story of how he was the first person to go through the files in Buenos Aires from Peron’s time to see how widespread the immigration of Nazis to Argentina had been and how they got there. Peron was, of course, immensely sympathetic to Nazis and brought them in by the thousand after the war. The files have mostly disappeared and while Goni was doing his research there were mysterious fires that destroyed the documents he was working on and things were disappearing all over the place. It is as much about how Argentina came to terms with its dictatorial past as it is about Nazi history. It’s thanks to him that what’s left is left.” Read more...

The best books on Nazi Hunters

Guy Walters, Journalist

“This is a history book by an Argentine historian who taught at Berkeley for many years and it covers the history of Latin America since independence, highlighting one particular point. That is that the structure of inequality that characterises Latin America explains the political structure in the region and also the economic conditions. In short, the book discusses why Latin America has failed to develop.” Read more...

The best books on Latin American Politics

Patricio Navia, Political Scientist

“It’s a collection of various short pieces written around the middle of Borges’s career—mostly fictions but not only fictions. It’s a wonderful selection, very philosophical. Borges is more a creator than an observer of worlds…” Read more...

The best books on Philosophical Wonder

Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher

“He was born in Uruguay and made his fame and fortune in Argentina, where there’s a lot more money and a much more affluent eating class. Another chef and restaurateur once explained to me that Uruguay is a poor country with few natural resources, dwarfed by Argentina to the South and Brazil to the North. But the one thing every Uruguayan man knows how to do is roast meat over a wood fire. It is their cultural claim to greatness. After catering to the highest echelon of Latin American society in a series of Eurocentric restaurants, Mallman said: Wait a minute – why am I sautéing like a French clone when we have this incredible Latin American tradition of cooking over live fire?…I picked him because he celebrates a style of cooking that epitomises the rustic and primitive, and yet at the same time he writes about live-fire cooking with great intelligence. And he’s the first guy to organise the various South America live-fire cooking methods into a logical, coherent system. Not to mention his food is amazing.” Read more...

The best books on Barbecue and Grill

Steven Raichlen, Cooks & Food Writer

“I love they way Martín Kohan writes. And even though this story is not real, it is based on real events. The people in Argentina had to live together with this kind of horrible historical characters — they lived amongst us in society until they were finally put in jail. In the book, there are no stereotypes. Nobody is good all the time, nobody is bad all the time.” Read more...

Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels

Claudia Piñeiro, Novelist

“The novel takes a very important issue that is relevant not just for Argentina but also for many parts of the world, namely violence against women. A kind of violence ignored or belittled by some current governments or presidents. Some even claim that it is the same to kill a man or a woman. It is not the same. Reyes takes a very important matter and looks at it in a very creative way.” Read more...

Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels

Claudia Piñeiro, Novelist

“Selva Almada is, in many ways, the writer of the river. She often sets her stories on a river landscape. This has is rooted in a very interesting tradition in Argentinian literature or literature from the River Plate, whereby othe well-known writers have taken the river as a scenario to explore a certain narrative. Not a River is a book written by a woman, but the main characters are men. In other words, Selva shows in this novel a very masculine world. I don’t want to spoil the story, but the focus is on three big, masculine men who treat the river as if they were its owners.” Read more...

Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels

Claudia Piñeiro, Novelist

“Fever Dream was her first novel and it led her to be very well-known, especially in the international sphere. Lots of people prefer to read novels to short stories—I mean, I love short stories, but I know that most readers prefer novels. So Fever Dream marked an important change for her. It’s in the margins of science fiction or fantastic literature. Something is happening, and you don’t know if it is real or not.” Read more...

Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels

Claudia Piñeiro, Novelist

“The Adventures of China Iron is a book of adventures, written in beautiful prose, with extraordinary characters. It’s an interesting lens through which to rethink our country’s literary tradition, and how it must change.” Read more...

Five of the Best 21st-Century Argentinian Novels

Claudia Piñeiro, Novelist

“He talks about the arrival of psychoanalysis with immigration and how the language of it actually spread through the media, especially women’s magazines. Then the University in Buenos Aires began to teach it and in the 1960s the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association was formed. Then with the dictatorship in 1976 psychoanalysis came to be seen as quite subversive and a lot of psychoanalysts were tortured and killed. The regime appropriated some of the language and theories, though, and used them for their own ends of indoctrination.” Read more...

The best books on Argentina and Psychoanalysis

Chris Moss, Travel Writer

“I could have chosen thousands of books about tango. I’m not a dancer but I do have a passion for tango music and lyrics. This book traces the black, African history of tango. Argentina is famous for whitening its culture. Whereas Brazil still has a mixed-race community and so does Uruguay, in Argentina the blacks were used as cannon fodder in wars against the Indians, and many tango historians have tended to ignore the African influence in a music that is infused with African rhythms. The chances are that the word tango is African, perhaps Angolan, perhaps it was the name of the place or a kind of drum. It’s clearly not Spanish. There are early 19th-century sketches of African mourners at funerals moving in a tango-like way and one of them shows black people carrying a coffin and making these strange movements. It’s possible. Funerals might have been more festive than they are now and certainly people talk about tango as the dance of death. The book hints that it might have come from a ritual funeral dance. Of course, tango used to be part of the carnival culture that has more or less died out now in urban Argentina.” Read more...

The best books on Argentina and Psychoanalysis

Chris Moss, Travel Writer

“Argentina has a strong history of historical essentialism, books that try to find the essence of a country. This one is about what we do with the infinite empty space that we have inherited as a country. Most of the population of Argentina is concentrated in Buenos Aires and the second city, Córdoba, and there is too much emptiness, wildness and emptiness, wilderness in a Biblical sense.” Read more...

The best books on Argentina and Psychoanalysis

Chris Moss, Travel Writer

“This is actually a short story and is usually published in collections. It was written in 1839 but was censored and not published until much later. It wasn’t an easy road to peace for Argentina and this story was written in the middle of the struggle, by a liberal Argentinian educated in Europe and in opposition to the country’s first dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas. It’s an allegory of those times. An educated liberal is murdered by mixed-race gauchos and black women and some critics say that the visceral, physical terminology used to describe the murder is more like rape than murder.” Read more...

The best books on Argentina and Psychoanalysis

Chris Moss, Travel Writer

“Many of his books are very psychoanalytic and full of mirrors, labyrinths, tigers and alter egos. He always had a sense of being shadowed by another self. Borges is famous for his metaphors and conundrums but the stories in this book are much less allusive and somehow more complete than those in some of the other, better known, collections. These are all about Buenos Aires and feature duals, mythical figures, places with patios and grilled windows, and are full of a sense of his native Palermo.” Read more...

The best books on Argentina and Psychoanalysis

Chris Moss, Travel Writer