Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! Hispanic Heritage Month, which extends from September 15 – October 15, is a celebration of the rich, historic contributions of people from Spanish-speaking areas around the globe. At Private Prep, we’re celebrating by reading books from celebrated Hispanic authors! Below, we’ve gathered a few of our favorites. This list is in no way exhaustive, but we hope it helps you discover — or rediscover — exceptional Hispanic writers.
Gabriel García Márquez
Our Favorite Novel: A Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian novelist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote magical realist fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation. In his work, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, priests levitate, and lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart. Novelist William Kennedy hailed Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
Sandra Cisneros
Our Favorite Novel: The House on Mango Street
Though the works of Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros tend to focus on Latin-American politics, the brevity and humor of her stories help make them accessible even to those unfamiliar with Mexican-American culture. She writes in a feminist, modernist mode, and her stories do not typically center on a single consciousness or point of view; they are often populated by voices rather than characters. About her beloved coming-of-age novel The House on Mango Street, poet Julia Alvarez said: “This little book has made a great space for itself on the shelf of American literature.”
Isabel Allende
Our Favorite Novel: The House of the Spirits
Chilean-American novelist Isabel Allende is one of the world’s best-known writers and a fierce defender of women and girls. Her work is wide-ranging, covering themes such as love, death, violence, organic justice, strong women, absent fathers, people at risk and power with impunity. In the 1960s, she was fired from a job translating romance novels into Spanish after it was discovered that she was altering the dialogue of the female characters to make them sound more intelligent. Allende quickly turned to creating intelligent female characters of her own and has gone on to sell more than 56 million books, which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have won multiple awards in Chile and throughout the world.
Carmen Maria Machado
Our Favorite Novel: In the Dream House
Breathtakingly inventive novelist, short story writer, and graphic novelist Carmen Maria Machado has quickly made a name for herself with her irreverent, ambitious, genre-busting work and her idiosyncratic writing style, with its heat and precise command of tone. She credits great Latin writers like Borges and Garcia Marquez with helping her develop her authorial voice: metafiction, liminal fantasy, magical realism, all written in a lyrical, literary style. Machado’s tender, incandescent memoir In the Dream House chronicles her experience in an abusive relationship and ricochets from style to style — literary criticism, Disney tale, horror, Bible story — with each chapter.
Interested in getting a book by a Hispanic author for your child? Check out this list of children’s books by Hispanic authors or our team’s list of favorite books.
