Lucille Kerr is professor of Latin American literature in the Deptartment of Spanish and Portuguese and an affiliated faculty member in comparative literary studies, Jewish studies, and Latin American and Caribbean studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Suspended Fictions: Reading Novels by Manuel Puig and Reclaiming the Author: Figures and Fictions from Spanish America. She is the director of the Web-based Latin American Literature and Film Archive and a review editor of the Latin American Literary Review. Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. In addition to writing Narrativas Híbridas and The Censorship Files: Latin American Writers and Franco' s Spain, he has guest-edited a special issue for Symposium on "New Latin American Narrative" and coedited Market Matters, a special issue of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies.

In the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Latin American authors found themselves writing for a new audience in both Latin America and Spain and in an ideologically charged climate as the Cold War found another focus in the Cuban Revolution. The writers who emerged in this energized cultural moment--among others, Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), José Donoso (Chile), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Manuel Puig (Argentina), and Mario Varas Llosa (Peru)--experimented with narrative forms that sometimes bore a vexed relation to the changing political situations of Latin America.
This volume provides a wide range of options for teaching the complexities of the Boom, explores the influence of Boom works and authors, presents different frameworks for thinking about the Boom, proposes ways to approach it in the classroom, and provides resources for selecting materials for courses.