Under the Volcano
1947 · 402 pages
Drinking himself to death in Mexico, a British ex-consul is visited by the wife who left him. Lowry gives them one Day of the Dead, written from inside the bottle.
★ 8.0
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Pedro Paramo
1955 · 144 pages
Looking for the father he never met, a man walks into a Mexican town where everyone he speaks to is dead. Voices drift free of their bodies, and magical realism follows.
★ 8.0
The Savage Detectives
1998 · 592 pages
Two young poets calling themselves visceral realists vanish into the Sonoran desert hunting a woman who published a single poem decades earlier. Forty voices over twenty years piece together where they went.
★ 7.7
The Conquest of New Spain
1568 · 412 pages
Fifty years on, writing in Guatemala, one of Cortés's foot soldiers set down the conquest of Mexico as the ranks saw it. He never got over his first sight of Tenochtitlan.
★ 7.3
All the Pretty Horses
1992 · 302 pages
Sixteen years old and landless, John Grady Cole rides into Mexico in 1949 and finds work breaking horses on a great hacienda. McCarthy writes horses and hard country better than any American novelist.
★ 6.8
The Labyrinth of Solitude
1950 · 398 pages
Mexicans wear masks, Paz argues, because the Conquest left them sons of a violated mother, heirs to two pasts they refuse to join. Mexico has quarreled with these essays for seventy years.
★ 6.5
The Death of Artemio Cruz
1962 · 307 pages
Artemio Cruz lies dying in 1959, a newspaper baron who fought in the Mexican Revolution and spent the decades after betraying it. His life returns in three voices: I, you, and he.
★ 6.5
History of the Conquest of Mexico
1843 · 1005 pages
Cortés lands with six hundred men and topples an empire of millions. Prescott, half-blind and never in Mexico or Spain, told it so vividly historians still pry the conquest from his version.
★ 5.8
Like Water for Chocolate
1989 · 246 pages
Tradition forbids the youngest daughter to marry, so Tita cooks, and everything she feels enters the food. Her quail in rose petal sauce sends a sister off naked with a Mexican revolutionary.
★ 4.7