100 books like Pedro Páramo

This novel is impossible. Names, plots, generations, and vivid words all created hurdles for me to finish it. I honestly wanted to give up, but I always came back to the book.

The hurdles cast a spell that demanded me to continue. I wanted to know what happened to Macondo, the fictional town in the book. The magic elements and scents of the words left me spellbound for years. The reading experience elevated me to a colorful world, and I almost did not want to return to my reality.

Honestly, I first picked up this novel because of the abundance of recipes within its pages!

I also enjoyed the fanciful idea that food can have power over emotions. And Like Water for Chocolate is a tale full of feeling, offering me a roller coaster experience as I journeyed with Tita, hoping for love and redemption for her in the end. Esquivel also wrote about strong ties to family and tradition, which resonated with me. 

This novel is a graphic and passionate family saga. I came from a big family and could totally relate to the story of many generations.

I read it in one math class in high school and got punished by the teacher. I clearly remember the teacher’s distorted face when he threw my book out of the window. “Could this crap be more important than math?” I said YES. Yes. Yes. Yes. A thousand yeses.

He failed me, which was fine. Allende’s magical realism allowed me to aspire to become a novelist. I did become a writer, and I would still say YES to my math teacher.

I read these short stories when I was twelve, reread them countless times as an adult, and was forever changed. Entering these pages is like journeying through the looking glass, only to enter a labyrinth of mystery, secrets, and chance. It may seem like an outlier from the books above. Yet Borges was a pioneer in speculative fiction and one of a kind. One of the stories has been called the greatest ever written. Just saying.

This is a wild, one-sitting read. At first you might not know where you are, but after a few pages, you’re completely hooked.

It’s creepy and visceral about what it means to be a mother when the world is turning more and more toxic. It might be considered an eco-horror book. This story works on your subconscious, leaving you with a sticky, unsettling feeling.

Also, it’s translated from Spanish. The title of the Spanish version is The Rescue Distance.    

I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for a year in 1988, five years after the last military dictatorship ended. I remember seeing the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo holding vigils in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace for los desaparecidos, their children who 'disappeared' during the last dictatorship. Enriquez creates strange, dense worlds of horror in these stories, with dark, unexplained, and sometimes magical undercurrents. The stories are not directly about the events, but reference them obliquely, only adding to the terror. Enriquez’s writing style blew me away, and her stories defy easy categorisation.

The Kingdom of this World is written by a Cuban writer and pits two worldviews against each other—the Afro-Haitian and the French.

This short novel is set at the end of the eighteenth century in Haiti, and the French are trying to maintain control of their colonies in the Caribbean. We see these different world views from both points of view so that the same event can have disastrously different meanings.

We follow the Haitian slave, Ti Noel, who reports on “magical” happenings that stem from his Haitian belief in shape-shifting: men can take flight if necessary, or transform themselves into animals or insects, or otherwise do what the French consider “magic” and the Haitians consider normal. We see events from the French point of view of Pauline Bonaparte, sister of Napoleon and wife of a French general who was sent to Haiti to put down the slave revolt. 

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I was given this as a present and what a wonderful present it was. Deborah Turbeville is a wonderful photographer whose work I admire. Her fashion photography was innovative, imaginative and so creative.

This book, a visual diary of her house and time in Mexico is filled with her signature blurred images, from black and white portraits to colourful interiors. It goes against everything we learn in Interiors but it’s magical, evocative, and gothic.

I read The Brick People when it was first published in 1988.

At the time, I was already familiar with Morales’ work, but this historical novel about the Simons Brick Factory in Southern California and the Mexican migrants who the Simons brother depended upon for their success seized my imagination.

The author blends folklore, history, myth, and magical realism into a novel that relates the story of Mexican migrants and their complicity with or rebellion against the Simons brothers and the mores of the early 20th Century Los Angeles region.

Morales shows how history from the ground up is manifested in people’s lives.  His characters work and play hard as they seek to build community and pursue dreams of social mobility even when customs and laws prohibit them.

The Mexican Revolution was photographed by many photographers, foreigners as well as Mexicans, whose photographs were collected by news agencies and distributed immediately in newspapers, sometimes even as the fighting was going on. Their photos record defining moments in Mexico’s history, and offer portraits of its participants: soldiers and camp followers (women and children), as well as iconic leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, among others. 

I love this book because it is written by a woman who lived her whole life in Mexico, experienced events of the Revolution, and knew many of its participants. Her personal account is accompanied by 184 photos that enhance her text and make events and people come alive.

The importance of this Revolution cannot be exaggerated. It engulfed much of Mexico for at least two decades (1910-1930), and claimed between 2 and 3.5 million lives. Troops advanced on horseback and trains, in dusty fields… show more.