The most recommended Argentina books

Maximus is a cute fellow, who is much larger than the average platypus. Max has a loving family, but he endures a trauma when his bed floats away from home during a rainstorm and he loses track of this family. Max encounters other animals who have some of the same traits. For example, Deedee Duck has a bill like Max and similar feet, but she’s not related. Soon Max meets Ollie the Otter, hoping they were part of the same family. Ollie admits their tails look alike, but still; they are not related. In the end, all of the animals Max meets help reunite him with his grandparents. Max is delighted, but he also realizes his new friends are part of his extended family. I loved that message and found the illustrations to be endearing.

This is the third book in the Trip Callaway Gig mystery series written by Phil Swann. While I’ve enjoyed all the Trip Callaway books, I especially like this one because it takes place in 1966 Hollywood. In this story, musician and undercover agent Trip Callaway takes us into the world of Los Angeles studio musicians, who played on all those memorable recordings and variety shows of the time. On top of spending some quality time in great, but sadly long gone, Hollywood hotspots like Shelly’s Manne Hole, The Palomino, and Martoni’s – places I went growing up in Los Angeles – Tinseltown Tango is also a ripping good yarn. If you enjoy a good murder mystery with a dash of music and no shortage of laughs, check out this book. You won’t be disappointed. 

There is no U.S. equivalent to the comic strip “Mafalda,” a strip centered around a young, middle-class girl and her entourage of neighborhood friends set in mid-1960s Buenos Aires. The strip itself only lasted a decade but its afterlives continue to reverberate across Latin America and throughout other parts of the world. Today, the face of Mafalda—the strip’s namesake—can be found with a speech bubble protesting any number of injustices. It is probably no exaggeration to say that this is the most important comic strip ever written, and one whose appeal lies both in its simplicity and the subtle depth of its political humor. Published here in translation, Cosse, a noted scholar of cultural and social history, has written a biography of the strip and its characters as a way not only of understanding the crisis of Argentina’s middle classes, but the ways in which the mass media transform objects… show more.

I adored this book. After I turned the final page, I sat in silence, sinking into all the feels. Set in Argentina, Furia is the story of Camila, a fierce soccer—or fútbol—player who is one of the best in her sport. However, she’s forced to keep her love of fútbol a secret because she’s living under the strict supervision of her father, who doesn’t believe girls should play sports. That story alone would be enough to make Furia one of my all-time favorite books, but it’s also got an incredible swoony love story. You don’t want to miss this one. 

What I loved most about this was the story within the story. A famous author is travelling back from a convention in Brazil when his plane goes down. The only other survivor is a young boy, not quite in his teens. In order to reach safety, they must battle not only Colombian drug runners and other nefarious characters, but the jungle itself.

Back to the cold now as well as back in time to a book I read when I was at school. I remember the first time I read this being utterly confounded by how this little boy, Ivan, was going to survive on his own in the snowy wilderness. Not only that, but how was he going to find his brother: his whole reason for setting out in the first place? I was gripped from the very first page to the very last, and it’s lived in my heart ever since. In fact, when I came to write Nevertell, the Ice Palace was a big inspiration.

This edited volume does a lot of things, allowing authors who have published in Spanish to advance their arguments in English as well as establishing conversations among historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists. Some authors focus on the production and consumption of culture, like Matthew Karush with his examination of the Afro-Argentinean guitar player Oscar Alemán, and Rebekah Pite’s chapter on food history. Ezequiel Adamovsky and Eduardo Elena essays center on race and class during the foundation of Peronism as a political movement, and representations of skin color in politics since mid-twentieth century. While Peronism has never openly challenged conceptions of a White Argentina, some non-white Argentineans sought Peronism as a space to challenge ideas of whiteness.

This is a thoroughly researched story about the late 19th-century sex trafficking of young Jewish women from Russian shtetls to Argentina.

Kidnapped women violently raped and forced into prostitution are obviously disturbing topics, but Carner masterfully handles this with insight and empathy. The book follows the charismatic main character from age 14 through age 22 as she moves from powerlessness and hopelessness to strength and bravery.

Who is Vera Kelly isn’t your typical 1960s Cold War spy novel.

Although Vera’s sexuality is unresolved and she’s had a rocky road to adulthood, the CIA recruits her. She goes to work as an undercover agent in Buenos Aires. Her day job is to infiltrate a campus Marxist group with ties to the KGB. At night, she transcribes wiretaps taken from the presidential palace. When her handler goes dark, Vera is caught in the middle of a coup.

Who is Vera Kelly takes us into the mindset of lovely Vera. She’s fresh, funny, quirky, and comes off as a (relatively) regular gal, albeit one who is scrambling to stay alive in South America.

Did you know that African and indigenous people worked together in what is today Bolivia and Argentina? They were both enslaved and those who had bought their freedom. Bolivia, high in the mountains, might seem remote, but in the 1500s and 1600s its rich silver mines were the motor of the Spanish Empire’s economy. And Spain was the superpower that dominated Europe, America, and the Atlantic.

Bolivia and the zones that supplied it with coerced and free workers, mules, food, wine, textiles, and the stimulant coca leaf was called Charcas, and it was the most valuable and important part of all of the Americas at the time.

This wonderfully detailed book by an outstanding Bolivian historian tells the story of the Black and indigenous laborers who made this possible.

Borges writes only short fiction—and his collection of stories Labyrinths made a huge impression on me. The stories have a clean, almost mathematical style, and are often based on a single, bizarre concept. For instance: just suppose there existed a library in which the books represent all the possible combinations of the letters of the alphabet—so some books consist of nonsense, others consist of the complete works of Shakespeare, or even Shakespeare’s works differing by one letter from the original. In my book, I include an inset story about a man called Mr. N, who spends fifteen years of his life cataloguing every word in The Pickwick Papers and this story was strongly influenced by Borges.

This is a concise noir with clear and simple prose. There is no metafiction, magical realism, or non-linear narrative to contend with. The protagonist, Mr. Machi, is a terrible person, almost psychopathic, a symbol of everything that is wrong in Argentina. The book is a critique of unbridled capitalism and its status symbols. To kick things off, Machi finds a dead body inside the boot of his beloved BMW and from there the action and the hilarity don’t stop. Told from the point of view of Machi, we have an uncomplicated antihero, a person completely without redeeming features. According to legend, the author still works as a subway station cleaner.

This book also centers on a post-dictatorship period, looking not only at accountability for the thousands that were killed or disappeared during Argentina’s military junta, but also at the struggle for social and economic rights amid an economic crisis in the 1980s.

Adair centers her book on the Raúl Alfonsín presidency to look at the various challenges he faced, and the demands that citizens placed on his government to ensure basic needs. The book is also imminently readable and filled with moving anecdotes about citizens’ struggles during this period. 

In this book, Javier Cercas, a Spanish journalist and novelist, sets off on a journey to discover the truth about his great-uncle, Manuel Mena, who was killed aged 19 at the Battle of the Ebro, during the Spanish Civil war. Cercas is a man of the center-left, but his relative was killed while fighting on the side of General Franco’s nationalist, anti-Communist and anti-democratic insurgency. This book is about the way that conflict and its memory remains present in families over subsequent generations, shaping subsequent lives in myriad ways, sometimes unseen. It is of particular value I think because of the way in which Cercas manages to examine his opposition to the cause with which his great-uncle served, and his deep sense of linkage to his relative, without ever compromising either.  

This book is research-driven. But that doesn't mean it’s dry and dusty. Just the opposite! You can expect to pick up at least a dozen practical bits of advice or information you will use in your marriage and will even come in handy in any situation when you are interacting with the women. You’ll enjoy the conversational down-to-earth style, and walk away with real-life revelations that really will help you better understand women, and your wife in particular. You’ll find yourself in the doghouse less frequently and for a shorter duration. And she’ll snuggle up to you more often seemingly for no reason at all.

Greg Grandin integrates the history of a slave rebellion in the vessel Tryal sailing from Valparaiso (Chile) to Lima (Peru) to the large narrative of how capitalism fueled slavery in the early nineteenth century. As the captives passed through the Rio de la Plata region on their way from Africa to Chile, Grandin weaves the history of the southern cone of South America in this story of deception. Herman Melville’s novel Benito Cereno (1855) popularized this slave rebellion, which allows Grandin to establish connections between the North and South Atlantic. Intriguingly, Grandin found another story of a shipboard slave rebellion on the vessel San Juan Nepomuceno, where captives made it back from Montevideo to Africa, which perhaps constitutes the most successful shipboard slave rebellion in the history of this horrific traffic. 

This book inspires the reader to connect their mind with movement. The author has filled the days of the year with practice prompts, ideas to help boost self-awareness and push past adversity, and wisdom from artists and scholars as well. Sole to Soul motivated me to connect with nature, my own stillness, and with others. A great daily devotional. And a great gift especially during these tough times.

Paulina Alberto wrote a binge-reading biography of Raúl Grigera, a Black legend of Buenos Aires during the golden age of tango. While Alberto reconstructs the family’s history of Grigera since the times of slavery in early nineteenth-century Argentina, the narrative arc of the book is the unequal power to control narratives about the self, which affected Grigera and other Black men and women who suffered the dominant and racist narratives about Blackness in Argentina, particularly on the disappearance of Afro-Argentines. This book illustrates the biographical turn in African Diaspora Studies combined with an exquisite interdisciplinary approach, which Alberto employs in her examination of “racial stories” as a methodology.

Borges has the confidence and courage to write without any concessions to genre or previously understood conceptions of normality, he scares nothing off the reader and does not know where they stand with him.

I believe he is obsessed with ideas pertaining to eternity, and the illusionary nature of space and time, which stand behind his otherwise bizarre and sometimes confusing plots, that often, superficially, resemble detective stories or fragmentary memoirs. Wring that is in service to ideas is often poorer for it, but Borges dramatises philosophy in a way that is as readable as it is original.

An atheist doctor, a former priest with wavering faith, and a whiskey-sodden British consul in sweltering Northeastern Argentina. The Honorary Consul has all the elements of a classic Greene novel. The author in his autobiography ‘Ways of Escape’ said it was his favourite work. Over the river from the small town of Corrientes is Paraguay and the American backed dictator, General Stroessner. In a muddle up Charlie Fortnam gets kidnapped by Paraguayan rebels hoping for an exchange of prisoners; the American Ambassador was the real target. The British government isn’t eager to get involved, Charlie is a sixty-year-old ‘honorary’ consul and alcoholic. Worse still he has recently married Clara, a young prostitute – not a becoming image at all.