Leaving Macondo

At the Hay festival in Cartagena, Maya Jaggi finds that a younger breed of Latin American novelists are moving out of the long shadow of Marquez's magic realism -- from the "narco-realism" of Jorge Franco to the Gothic fantasies of Francisco Goldman to Laura Restrapo's attempts to capture "women's reality".

Meanwhile, Franco's Paradise Travel is reviewed in the Christian Science Monitor: "...for readers who want to dip into the dark urban currents emerging in Latin literature as well as to enjoy a survival tale (and the love story here is a survival tale as well), this tight and skillfully plotted novel would be the book."