I've been reading Spanish-language fiction in translation for five years and the experience has made me want to learn Spanish, which I think is the correct response to a good body of translated literature.

The writers I've spent the most time with: Roberto Bolaño, whose 2666 is the most formally ambitious novel I've read in any language and whose The Savage Detectives is the one I'd start with. Elena Poniatowska, whose Massacre in Mexico is narrative non-fiction that should be better known. And Jorge Volpi, whose In Search of Klingsor I read three times before I understood what it was doing.

The thing that characterizes the best Latin American fiction of the last fifty years, to my outsider's eye, is an engagement with the relationship between history and fiction — a refusal to accept the division between what happened and what was written about what happened as stable.