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• La Celestina – 16th Century anonymous play, considered to mark the start of the Spanish literary Renaissance
• Lope de la Vega – playwright from 16th/17th Century, best known for El caballero de Olmedo.
• Pedro Calderón de la Barca – playwright from 16th/17th century, best known for La vida es sueño
• Antonio Buero Vallejo – 20th Century Mexican playwright. I have no idea how good or how well-known Buero is, but his play, En la ardiente oscuridad, gets read in lit classes all the time. (Not in verse)

• El poema del mio Cid
• Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz – Mexican nun and poet of the 17th century.
• Rubén Darío – 19th Century Nicaraguan poet, often considered to have started modernismo
• José Martí – Mid to late 19th Century Cuban poet and hero Antonio Machado – Part of the Generation of ’99 (1899), one of the most popular Spanish poets
• Alfonsina Storni – Early 20th Century Argentine poet
• Federico Garcia Lorca – Early 20th Spanish poet and playwright; part of surrealist movement. Best known for the play, La casa de Bernarda Alba. I’d recommend his collection of poems, Romancero gitano.
• Gabriela Mistral – Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate
• Pablo Neruda
• Octavio Paz – Mexican poet, essayist and Nobel Prize winner

• Lazarillo de Tormes – anonymous picaresque novel from 16th Century Spain, also an allegory based on the seven deadly sins - I’m pretty sure I read an abridged version of this, so that’s probably available somewhere.
• Esteban Echeverría – 19th Century Argentine short story writer. Best known example of the Latin American romantic tradition (which is very different from US/UK romantic literature) and author of “El Matadero”, which I think is sometimes considered to be the first Latin American short story.
• Jorge Luis Borges – 20th Century Argentine short story writer. Possibly the most important Latin American author.
• Julio Cortázar – 20th Century author, part of the “Boom Generation”. Best known for Rayuela, a book which can either be read straight from cover to cover or by following his directions at the end of each chapter; also the short story “Las Babas del Diablo” which was translated and made into the film, Blow-Up. His stories always mess with your mind. I’d recommend the story “La noche boca arriba” in which a modern day Miskitu Indian is in a motorcycle crash and while recovering dreams he is about to be sacrificed to the Incan gods.
• Gabriel García Márquez – If Borges isn’t the most important Latin American writer, than García Márquez probably is.
• Mario Vargas Llosa – Peruvian author best known for La ciudad y los perros (translated in English as The Time of the Heros).
• Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) – Contemporary Mexican author, best known for El muerte de Artemio Cruz
• Isabel Allende – Chilean author, most famous for La casa de los espiritus. I personally love Paula, which she wrote as a letter to her daughter who was in a coma.
• Laura Esquivel - Como agua para chocolate, almost everyone’s seen the movie, the book is much better. I’ve read one of her other novels, and it’s nowhere near as good.

• El Inca Garcilaso – 16th Century poet/essayist, considered by many to be first truly Latin American author, wrote Comentarios reales de los Incas, about Inca life and the Inca perspective of the conquest
• Rigoberta Menchú – Quiché Indian from Guatemala whose controversial autobiography, Yo, Rigoberta Menchú, helped to earn her the Nobel Peace Prize
• Eduardo Galeano – Contemporary Uruguayan journalist who wrote Memoria del fuego, three volumes of narrative about Latin American history. It is very powerful and because it’s all a series of vignettes, it’s very easy to read.

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FROM THE CRITICS

Chicago Tribune
Plenty of thrills...Perez-Reverte pulls it all together with elegance.

New York Newsday
A stunner...an eerie, erudite mystery.

New York Daily News
A cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice...a beach book for intellectuals. -- New York Daily News

Kirkus Reviews
An intricate and very bookish mystery novel—set, in fact, in the rarefied world of book collecting and dealing—from the sophisticated Spanish author of The Flanders Panel (1994, not reviewed).
The story begins with the hiring of professional "book-hunter" Lucas Corso by Boris Balkan, a translator and collector who seeks authentication of a handwritten manuscript chapter of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers that has fortuitously, as they say, come into his possession. Traveling back and forth between Paris and Madrid, Corso matches wits with Liana Taillefer, whose husband's suicide was somehow connected with his ownership of the Delomelanicon, an illustrated medieval volume said to contain secret instructions for summoning the devil, and of which only two other copies are known to exist. Corso is soon involved in a byzantine international intrigue carried on by those who want, or have information about, the Dumas chapter and the infernal Delomelanicon, including: urbane and ruthless bookseller Varo Borja; an aged German baroness; a threatening man with a facial scar whom his quarry Corso bemusedly nicknames "Rochefort" (after Dumas); and a preternaturally self-possessed teenaged girl who says she's Irene Adler (this being the name of Sherlock Holmes's most infamous mystery woman). Pérez-Reverte plaits all these teasing strands together with imperturbable skill, leaving the reader wondering until almost the final pages about the significance of his seductive title, and the allegation that Alexandre Dumas's narrative genius was the result of his pact with Satan. A lot happens in this novel, despite its constant recourse to prearranged meetings and extended conversations, and its enormity of detail about the nuts and bolts of book manufacture, publishing, searching, and dealing.

Bibliophiles will love this witty and clever fabrication, though its very specialized content may place it just outside the range of the general reader.

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