I have just read through this wonderfully informative list and I cannot wait to get my hands on some of these titles. I have read several of the more famous authors in translation, Cela, Borges, Fuentes et al., and believe it or not they read quite well in English, though I dont know whether I can form an opinion of their work on that basis! I happen to like Fuentes' essays very much, so now I am curious to see what his prose is like in Spanish. Borges, I agree, is a bit too heavy on the mental games, but in my youth I had a pronounced taste for metaphysical puzzlers.
I know that the emphasis on this thread is on contemporary literature, but I was wondering if anyone had anything to say about some of the classics as well? I am about to start "Los de Abajo" and I just finished struggling through, but enjoying Carpentier's first novel, Ecue Yamba O, which he himself renounced, but is in fact a very very interesting book for its stylistic experiments (a bit of surrealism, and lots of colloquialisms, etc). When I was an academic, my specialty was the 19th century novel -- I happen to love those big ambitious novels of social realism (Balzac, Dickens, Zola) where all these different narrative threads are pulled together in a magisterial manner -- are there any examples of this in Spanish literature?
There also appears to be a decided taste for novels as compared with poetry, but Spanish poetry is just sublime! Neruda has been mentioned, but let us go back a bit in time and acknowledge the wonderful accomplishment of Antonio Machado!
Just as a sidebar -- I see that Saramago,a Portuguese writer, was mentioned. I dont know if any of you have ever read any of Jorge Amado's work -- his later stuff, which I like less, is well known, but his first novel, Terra sem Fim, available in English as The Violent Land, is actually a very very good novel about the cocoa plantations. It is not Modernist in its style, reads more like a 19th century realist novel.
