Mexico has inspired some of the great writers of the twentieth century. Some of the names include D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, and Roberto Bolaño. In Mexico many have found a place of exile, of revelation, and reinvention. Its own writers, from Juan Rulfo and Rosario Castellanos to Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, lead readers through haunted villages, the vastness of Mexico City, indigenous worlds and myth, revolutionary memory and the modern borderlands. Mexico has been refuge, subject, argument and obsession. It is one of literature’s great trips to get lost in.
Start with these books
Mexico in Three Acts
Memory, restless youth, and a country in upheaval.
A promise to his dying mother brings Juan Preciado to Comala in search of his father. What he finds is a town speaking through memories, secrets and the voices of its dead. Rulfo’s brief, haunting novel makes rural Mexico palpable through land, power and lives that refuse to fall silent.
Young poets roam Mexico City, falling into friendships, arguments and literary obsessions before a search takes them into the Sonoran desert. Bolaño turns restless youth into a sprawling journey told by the people left in its wake. Mexico is the point of departure for a novel that refuses to stop at the border.
Ranches, desert country and healing traditions shape Teresita’s life in nineteenth-century northern Mexico. As pilgrims gather around her, a young woman’s calling becomes a threat to political power. Drawing on his own family history, Urrea gives this sweeping journey humour, hardship and the tensions of a country moving toward upheaval.
Anthony Bourdain sets off in search of the perfect meal, a quest that takes him from the streets and kitchens of Vietnam to Japan, Cambodia, Portugal, Mexico and beyond.
Mexico's vanished civilizations emerge through the changing work of travellers, conquerors and archaeologists who sought to understand their surviving traces.
Two cousins exchange letters between rural Mexico and the United States, discovering both differences and familiar pleasures in the details of daily life.
Modern Mexico becomes the landscape of a swift-moving adventure, where uncertainty and danger propel the journey through a restless contemporary world.
History, personalities and everyday institutions provide a wide-ranging portrait of Mexican society and the relationship between neighbours across the border.
Grillo follows the networks behind Mexico's drug trade, reporting on the money, corruption and lives within a particular stage of the country's conflict.
On a Mexican ranch, Tita's cooking carries forbidden emotion through meals that unsettle family traditions and turn recipes into a language of longing.
Yucatán's colonial churches reveal monasteries, village chapels and vernacular architecture, with routes linking the buildings to their surrounding landscapes.
A cousin's troubling letter brings Noemí to an isolated Mexican mansion, where family secrets and a decaying mining fortune nourish a gathering horror.
