Daniel Loedel is a book editor based in Brooklyn. His first novel, Hades, Argentina, was inspired by his half-sister, who was disappeared in Argentina in 1978 by the military dictatorship. It won the Prix du Premier Roman, was a finalist for the Prix Femina, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and VCU Cabell First Novel Award. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub, Poets & Writers, and other publications.
This is the iconic novel of Latin American magical realism, the one that most typifies what the genre is in people’s minds. But that’s not to say it’ll feel familiar or predictable; to the contrary, no book is more full of surprises, more original on every page than this story of a family over a hundred years in the legendary down of Macondo. Curses, angels, forbidden love, guerilla war, and the renewing and obliterating power of time—all that and much more are in this classic epic that created what we understand to be magical realism.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
Garcia Marquez famously claimed to have memorized Pedro Páramo, making it in some ways the actual cornerstone of Latin American magical realism. A strange, haunting novel about a man in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, who finds himself in a ghost town and listening to the memories of phantasms, this book is a spectral, beautiful story with mystifying power. It was probably the chief influence for my own novel which similarly follows a young man into a ghost world of the past.
Winner, Fred Whitehead Award for the Best Design of a Trade Book from Texas Institute of Letters Western Books Exhibition Selection, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2003 Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists-writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel Pedro Paramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed-Susana San…
The Argentine literary icon’s mode of magical realism is perhaps the most different from others, the one that stands most apart. Couched in history and intellectualism, many of his stories read at first as essays until they dart into some realm of the fantastical to make a startling point about identity, storytelling, or human existence. No writer uses the far reaches of the possible to make you think more than Borges.
The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century.
Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony,…
Originally titled Distancia de Rescate (“The Rescue Distance”), this novel which blends contemporary concerns of environmental catastrophe with the magic of psychics and haunted children is truly a feverish reading experience, one which you will devour in a single sitting and need to restart to understand what was real and what was not.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017
'The book I wish I had written' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women and Animal
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a remote Argentinian hospital. A boy named David sits beside her.
She's not his mother. He's not her child.
At David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, a conversation that opens a chest of horrors. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
A chilling tale of maternal anxiety and ecological…
Another contemporary book of Latin American magical realism, this one is perhaps subtlest in its surrealism and has most in common with the American Gothic tradition of Edgar Allan Poe. Things We Lost in the Fire reveals to us an Argentina filled with ghosts and haunted houses and satanic rituals while simultaneously bringing the country as it is today to vivid, powerful life.
'A portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades' Guardian
Sleep-deprived fathers conjuring phantoms; sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls; persecuted young women drawn to self-immolation. Organized crime sits side-by-side with the occult in Buenos Aires - a place where reality and the preternatural fuse into strange, new shapes. These stories follow the wayward and downtrodden, revealing the scars of Argentina's dictatorship and the ghosts and traumas that have settled in the minds of its people. Provocative, brutal and uncanny, Things We Lost in the Fire is a paragon of contemporary Gothic from a writer of singular…
In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. The reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both?
It will be years before Tomás is summoned back, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be.
Growing up in New England, my mother had a set of books that she kept in the living room, more for display than anything else. It was The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. I read them and instantly became hooked on horror. In the seventh grade, I entertained my friends at a sleepover by telling them the mysterious clanking noise (created by the baseboard heater) was the ghost of a woman who had once lived in the farmhouse, forced to cannibalize her ten children during a particularly bad winter. And I’ve been enjoying scaring people ever since.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunged off a waterfall to her death, leaving behind a legacy shrouded in secrets. Her great-niece Julia, a struggling journalist recovering from a divorce, seeks answers decades later.
Tasked with retrieving Dr. Greer’s discovery–a flower that could have world-changing properties–Julia unearths a story rife with hidden agendas and a missionary community unwilling to share the truth. As she confronts the eerie legends and a fellow traveler with his own motives, Julia finds that the longer she stays, the thinner the line between reality and the fantastical becomes until she…
From the award-winning author of Dead Souls and Poe comes an all-new bone-chilling novel where a mysterious island holds the terrifying answers to a woman's past and future.
In 1939, on a remote Pacific island, botanical researcher Irene Greer plunges off a waterfall to her death, convinced the spirits of her dead husband and daughter had joined the nightmarchers-ghosts of ancient warriors that rise from their burial sites on moonless nights. But was it suicide, or did a strange young missionary girl, Agnes, play a role in Irene's deteriorating state of mind?
