A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro (Translated by Frances Riddle)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2015
Description: After twenty years, a woman returns to the small-town Argentina she had fled to escape a dreadful accident, a sense of guilt, and social condemnation, leaving her son behind. But the woman who returns is not the same: she doesn't look the same, her voice is different, she doesn't even have the same name. After two decades spent in the United States, this damaged woman has rebuilt her life. Will those who knew her even recognise her? Will he recognise her? Not fully understanding her own reasons for going back to the suburb where she once lived and raised a family, and that she had been determined to forget forever, both anticipated encounters and unanticipated revelations show her that sometimes life is neither fate nor chance: perhaps her return is nothing more than a little luck.
Other Books by the Author(s): Elena Knows (2007) - Shorlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022, Cathedrals (2020), Time of the Flies (2022)

Bad Girls: A Novel by Camila Sosa Villada (Translated by Kit Maude)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2019
Description: (I also want to add that the author is a trans woman and so this is an own-voices novel.) Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s tale about finding a community on the margins. In Sarmiento Park, the green heart of Córdoba, a group of trans sex workers make their nightly rounds. When a cry comes from the dark, their leader, the 178-year-old Auntie Encarna, wades into the brambles to investigate and discovers a baby half dead from the cold. She quickly rallies the pack to save him, and they adopt the child into their fascinating surrogate family as they have so many other outcasts, including Camila. Sheltered in Auntie Encarna’s fabled pink house, they find a partial escape from the everyday threats of disease and violence, at the hands of clients, cops, and boyfriends. Telling their stories—of a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars—as well as her own journey from a toxic home in a small, poor town, Camila traces the life of this vibrant community throughout the 90s. Imbuing reality with the magic of a dark fairy tale, Bad Girls offers an intimate, nuanced portrait of trans coming-of-age that captures a universal sense of the strangeness of our bodies. It grips and entertains us while also challenging ideas about love, sexuality, gender, and identity.

Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (Translated by Frances Riddle)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2005
Description: Slum Virgin tells the larger-than-life story of Cleopatra, a transvestite who renounces prostitution after the Virgin Mary appears before her. Following the divine messages she receives, Cleo takes charge of the shantytown she lives in, transforming it into a tiny utopia. Ambitious journalist Quity knows she’s found the story of the year when she hears about it, but her life is changed forever once she steps into the shantytown and finds herself irrevocably seduced by the captivating subject of her article. The densely-packed, fast-paced prose, which weaves together everyday speech, shantytown slang and classical references, pulls the reader into the story immediately. The author turns phrases with dexterity, refusing to whitewash the reality of the poor and downtrodden, and jumping deftly from tragedy to biting comedy in a way that has the reader laughing out loud. According to Chacro Press, "Cabezón Cámara is one of the leading feminist and LGBTQ+ intellectuals in Latin America."
Other Books by the Author(s): The Adventures of China Iron (2017) , We Are Green and Trembling (2023)

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (Translated by Megan McDowell)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Rural farm community in Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2014
Description: A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He’s not her child. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, looming environmental and spiritual catastrophes, and the ties that bind a parent to a child. Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale. Samanta Schweblin creates an aura of strange psychological menace and otherworldly reality in this absorbing, taut, unsettling novel. Fresh and startling, this is like nothing you’ve ever read before.
Other Books by the Author(s): Little Eyes (2018), Mouthful of Birds (2009), Seven Empty Houses (2015)

Not a River by Selva Almada (Translated by Annie McDermott)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2020
Prizes: Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024
Description: The novel tells the story of two friends, Enero and El Negro, who take Tilo, the teenage son of Eusebio – their recently deceased friend – fishing to the Paraná River. While they drink and cook and talk and dance, they try to overcome the ghosts of their past and those of the present: their mood altered by wine and torpor. This intimate, peculiar moment connecting the lives of these three men also links them to the lives of the local inhabitants of this watery universe that runs by its own laws. There are losses, premature deaths… But there is also the stubborn vitality of nature: a bush covered with ancient trees, animals, birds; the river bearing life in its entrails, the people born and raised in this landscape which they protect tooth and nail against intruders. This story, which flows like water, talks about the love between friends, the love of a mother for her daughters, and the love of the islanders for their river and everything that lives in it. This masterful novel reveals once again Selva Almada's unique voice and extraordinary sensitivity, allowing its characters to shine and express in action what the depths of their souls harbour.
Other Books by the Author(s): Dead Girls (2014), The Wind that Lays Waste (2012), Brickmakers (2013)

Operation Massacre by Rodolfo Walsh (Translated by Daniella Gitlin)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Argentina, 1956
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1957
Description: 1956. Argentina has just lost its charismatic president Juán Perón in a military coup, and terror reigns across the land. June 1956: eighteen people are reported dead in a failed Peronist uprising. December 1956: sometime journalist, crime fiction writer, studiedly unpoliticized chess aficionado Rodolfo Walsh learns by chance that one of the executed civilians from a separate, secret execution in June, is alive. He hears that there may be more than one survivor and believes this unbelievable story on the spot. And right there, the monumental classic Operation Massacre is born. Walsh made it his mission to find not only the survivors but widows, orphans, political refugees, fugitives, alleged informers, and anonymous heroes, in order to determine what happened that night, sending him on a journey that took over the rest of his life. Originally published in 1957, Operation Massacre thoroughly and breathlessly recounts the night of the execution and its fallout.
More information: Walsh was the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina and is most famous for the letter he published the day before his murder, Open Letter From a Writer to the Military Junta.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (Translated by Megan McDowell)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Contemporary Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2009
Description: Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can't let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma. Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.
Other Books by the Author(s): Our Share of Night (2019), Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys (2025), A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories (2024), Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)

The Plains by Federico Falco (Translated by Jennifer Croft)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2020
Description: After a loss, a year in the country: four seasons to transform a garden and a self. 'In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible, ' our narrator tells us. In this remote house and garden, time is almost palpable; it goes by without haste and brings into sharp relief even the tiniest details: insects, the sound of the rain, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. Past and present are equally weighted and visible here, revealing themselves slowly with every season and turn of the spade.So a year unfolds. A garden takes shape as his connection deepens to this place, becoming a shelter from everyone and everything, perhaps even from himself. We see the ants devouring the chard, we hear the tales his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie, and we learn about his great love, Ciro. The humid sheets in the country, the carefully renovated apartment in the city and the painful, inexplicable break-up that prompted him to take refuge in this patch of now-carefully tended land.
Other Books by the Author(s): A Perfect Cemetery (2015)

Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar (Translated by Gregory Rabassa)
Author(s) from: Was born in Argentina and lived there for about 37 years before migrating to France in 1951.
Setting: Paris and Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1963
Description: Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves the Club. A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.
Other Books by the Author(s): Julio Cortázar is one of the most translated Argentinian authors and has many other books. From what I can tell, the setting of his stories and books varies. I have also seen specific recommendations for his poetry collection, Save Twilight: Selected Poems (1980).

Fictions/Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (Translated by Andrew Hurley)
Author(s) from: Argentina but did spend significant periods of time living in Switzerland.
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1944
Description: The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between.
Other Books by the Author(s): Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most translated Argentinian authors and has many other books. I have also seen specific recommendations for The Aleph and Other Stories (1949).

The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato (Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1948
Description: Infamous for the murder of Maria Iribarne, the artist Juan Pablo Castel is now writing a detailed account of his relationship with the victim from his prison cell: obsessed from the first moment he saw her examining one of his paintings, Castel had become fixated on her over the next months and fantasized over how they might meet again. When he happened upon her one day, a relationship was formed which swiftly convinced him of their mutual love. But Castel's growing paranoia would lead him to destroy the one thing he truly cared about... Sabato's first novel El Túnel (translated as The Outsider or The Tunnel), written in 1948, is framed as the confession of the painter Juan Pablo Castel, who has murdered the only woman capable of understanding him.
Other Books by the Author(s): On Heroes and Tombs (1961), The Angel of Darkness (1974)

Purgatory by Tomás Eloy Martínez (Translated by Frank Wynne )
Author(s) from: Was born in Argentina and spent most of his life living there though he did live in the U.S. for a time later in his life.
Setting: Argentina and New Jersey
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2007
Description: Simon Cardoso had been dead for thirty years when Emilia Dupuy, his wife, found him at lunchtime in the dining room of Trudy Tuesday. So begins Purgatory, the final and perhaps most personal work of the great Latin American novelist Tomas Eloy Martinez. Emilia Dupuy's husband vanished in the 1970s, while the two were mapping an Argentine country road. All evidence seemed to confirm that he was among the thousands disappeared by the military regime. Yet Emilia never stopped believing that the disappeared man would reappear. And then he does, in New Jersey. And for Simon, no time at all has passed. In Martinez's hands, this love story and ghost story becomes a masterful allegory for history political and personal, and for a country's inability to integrate its past with its present.
Other Books by the Author(s): The Peron Novel (1985), Santa Evita (1995), The Tango Singer (2004)

Martín Fierro by José Hernández (Translated by Kate Kavanagh)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1872 & 1879
Description: An epic poem of Argentina, in the "gauchesque" style. An adaptation of the ballad singing culture of the gaucho minority that saw its way of life threatened by social and political changes of the 19th century.

Rebellion in Patagonia by Osvaldo Bayer (Translated by Paul Sharkey and Joshua Neuhouser)
Author(s) from: Argentina but lived in exile in Germany during the years of military dictatorship.
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1992
Description: At the very end of Rebellion in Patagonia, Osvaldo Bayer writes: "Time always tears down the curtain that tries to hide the truth. A crime can never be covered up forever." He demonstrates that principle in this moving and nuanced study of strikes led by the powerful anarcho-syndicalist labor union FORA against the despotic landowners and industrialists of Argentina's Patagonia region in 1921- 1922. The tale ends tragically, with thousands slaughtered, but Bayer's detailed descriptions and first-person testimonies capture the beauty and heroism of the struggle. Banned and publicly burned in the 1970s, this is the book's first English translation--with a new introduction by Scott Nicholas Nappalos and Joshua Neuhouser.
Other Books by the Author(s): The Anarchist Expropriators: Buenaventura Durruti and Argentina's Working-Class Robin Hoods (2003)

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig (Translated by Thomas Colchie)
Author(s) from: Argentina but spent most of his life in exile.
Setting: Argentina
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1976
Description: In an Argentine prison, two men share a cell: Molina, a gay window dresser who is self-centered, self-denigrating, yet charming as well; and Valentin, an articulate, fiercely dogmatic revolutionary haunted by memories of a woman he left for the cause. Sometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their Buenos Aires prison cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause that makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love that makes all else endurable. Though they share little other than a cell, the two form a bond so intimate―and a relationship so profoundly affecting―that only the other could understand.
Other Books by the Author(s):

Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (Translated by Sarah Moses)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2017
Description: Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition." Now, eating human meat--"special meat"--is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he's given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he's aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost--and what might still be saved.
Other Books by the Author(s): The Unworthy (2023), Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird (2020),

The Days of the Deer by Liliana Bodoc (Translated by Nick Caistor)
Author(s) from: Argentina
Setting: Fantasy
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1999
Description: The first in an epic, highly acclaimed trilogy from an Argentinian fantasist. It is known that the strangers will sail from some part of the Ancient Lands and will cross the Yentru Sea. All our predictions and sacred books clearly say the same thing. The rest is all shadows. Shadows that prevent us from seeing the faces of those who are coming. In the House of Stars, the Astronomers of the Open Air read contradictory omens. A fleet is coming to the shores of the Remote Realm. But are these the long-awaited Northmen, returned triumphant from the war in the Ancient Lands? Or the emissaries of the Son of Death come to wage a last battle against life itself? From every village of the seven tribes, a representative is called to a Great Council. One representative will not survive the journey. Some will be willing to sacrifice their lives, others their people, but one thing is certain: the era of light is at an end.