The Rooftop by Fernanda Trías (Translated by Annie McDermott)
Author(s) from: Born in Uruguay and lived there for at least 28 years. Has also lived in France, Argentina, and New York.
Setting: Uruguay
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2000
Description: In a rundown apartment building, in an unnamed city in Uruguay, a father and daughter close themselves off from the world. 'The world is this house', says Clara while she is trying to protect her beloved ones from the world - yes, that one outside their house walls - which seems to threaten them more and more. Clara entrenches herself with her father and her daughter Flor in a dark apartment that inevitably crumbles on them. The roof becomes their last recess of freedom. A caged bird is the only witness of Clara's fear and resistance against those she thinks are trying to destroy her. 'Are threats and pain external or inside our own bodies? Where is violence's root? What are we afraid of? Is there a possibility to find a roof to finally being able to breathe? What are our umbilical cords?'. Fernanda Trìas does not answer these questions - impossible for anyone - about instinct, civilization and taboos, instead she gives them shape and dives deep into them a with a grotesque and forceful history written with agility and a Kafkaesque sense of humour. Rooftop is a claustrophobic novel about freedom, and also about fear, violence, motherhood and loss.
Other Books by the Author(s): Pink Slime (2020)

The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories by Horacio Quiroga (Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)
Author(s) from: Uruguay
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1909
Description: Stories included: The Feather Pillow, Sunstroke, The Pursued, The Decapitated Chicken, Drifting, A Slap in the Face, In the Middle of the Night, Juan Darien, The Dead Man, Anaconda, The Incense Tree Roof, & The Son. Horacio Quiroga's short stories are infused with the themes of life and death that so obsessed him. They span many fiction genres; jungle tale, Gothic horror story, psychological study, and morality tale- and possess a universality that has made him a classic Latin American writer. Horacio Quiroga was a master storyteller and author of over two hundred pieces of Latin American fiction that have been compared to the works of Poe, Kipling, and London. Like his stories, his own life from his birth in Uruguay to his suicide in Argentina was filled with adventure, tragedy, and violence.

Cantoras by Caro de Robertis
Author(s) from: Born in England to Uruguayan immigrants, Caro de Robertis now lives in the U.S. I believe they spent a few years in Uruguay as an adult.
Setting: 1977 Uruguay
Original Language: English
First Publised: 2019
Description: From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of The Gods of Tango, a revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family. In 1977 Uruguay, a military government crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In this environment, where the everyday rights of people are under attack, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression to be punished. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita “La Venus,” Paz, and Malena – five cantoras, women who “sing” – somehow, miraculously, find one another. Together, they discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next thirty-five years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home, as they return, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow, or alone. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested – by their families, lovers, society, and one another – as they fight to live authentic lives. A genre-defining novel and De Robertis’s masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. At once timeless and groundbreaking, Cantoras is a tale about the fire in all our souls and those who make it burn.
Other Books by the Author(s): The President and the Frog (2021), The Invisible Mountain (2009), So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color (2025)

The Ship of Fools by Cristina Peri-Rossi (Translated by Psiche Hughes)
Author(s) from: Lived in Uruguay for approximately the first 30 years of her life before being exiled to Spain in 1972.
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1984
Prizes: Cristina Peri-Rossi won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 2021.
Description: The Ship of Fools subverts and reinvents the novel form, its characters, genders, and language, mixing fantasy and reality, medieval and modern. The wandering hero refuses to conform to an established order that can descend to the depths of militarism and machismo. The relationship between power and sex is posed in a series of ever more ambiguous events, dreams and riddles. All is resolved in the stunning climax that wittily overturns the traditional novel's progress of man and woman towards the marriage bed.
Other Books by the Author(s): The Museum of Useless Efforts (1983)

The Truce by Mario Benedetti (Translated by Harry Morales)
Author(s) from: Uruguay but has spent time living in Argentina and Europe
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1960
Description: Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martín Santomé is about to retire. He assumes he'll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people do. What he least expects is to fall passionately in love with his shy young employee Laura Avellaneda. As they embark upon an affair, happy and irresponsible, Martín begins to feel the weight of his quiet existence lift - until, out of nowhere, their joy is cut short. The intimate, heartbreaking diary of an ordinary man who is reborn when he falls in love one final time, this beloved Latin American novel has been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, and is now published in Penguin Classics for the first time.
Note: This one may be hard to find in the U.S.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by (Translated by Cedric Belfrage)
Author(s) from: Born and lived in Uruguay until was exiled to Argentina and then Spain, returing to Uruguay in 1985.
Setting: South America
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1971
Description: Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant nonfiction text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably. This book was banned by the military governemnt of Uruguay as well as Argentina and Chile.
Other Books by the Author(s): Memory of Fire (1988) and many others

No by Idea Vilariño (Translated by María José Zubieta)
Author(s) from: Uruguay
Original Language: Spanish
Publised: 2025
Description: Idea Vilariño's final masterpiece, where poetry becomes both refusal and resilience. In No, Idea Vilariño strips poetry to its essence--distilling love, loss, and the inexorable passage of time into spare yet searing verses. Renowned as a leading voice of Uruguay's "Generation of 45," Vilariño's final collection is at once a defiant refusal and an unrelenting assertion of existence. From its stark nihilism emerges a poetic voice that insists on being heard, even as it denies life's joys. Now available in English for the first time, No has been masterfully translated by María José Zubieta, in collaboration with poet and musicologist J. Martin Daughtry. This bilingual edition preserves Vilariño's rhythmic precision and existential intensity, giving readers a rare glimpse into a body of work that continues to resonate far beyond its origins. No is a testament to the power of poetry to confront the void, and to carve meaning from silence.

Empty Words by Mario Levrero (Translated by Annie McDermott)
Author(s) from: Uruguay
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1996
Description: An eccentric novelist decides to go back to basics on his journey of self- improvement: he will strip out the literary aspect of his writing and simply improve his handwriting. The novelist begins to keep a notebook of handwriting exercises, hoping that if he is able to improve his penmanship, his personal character will also improve. What begins as a mere physical exercise becomes involuntarily coloured by humorous reflections and tender anecdotes about living, writing, and the sense – and nonsense – of existence. The first book by Mario Levrero to be translated into English, Empty Words is the perfect introduction to a major author and a significant point of reference in Latin American writing today.
Other Books by the Author(s): The Luminous Novel (2005), The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (1970)

Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros by Delmira Agustini (Translated by Alejandro Caceres)
Author(s) from: Uruguay
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 2008
Description: This graceful translation and bilingual edition is the first to bring English readers a representative sampling of the poetry Delmira Agustini published before her untimely death on July 6, 1914 at the age of twenty-seven. Translated by native Uruguayan Alejandro Caceres and including work from each of Agustini's four published books, Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros is a response to a resurgent interest not just in the poems but in the passionate and daring woman behind them and the social and political world she inhabited. Carefully selected for this bilingual, en face edition, the poems collected here track and highlight Agustini's development and strengths as an artist--including her methods of experimentation, first relying on modernista forms and later abandoning them--and her focus on the figure of the male, which she portrays as the crux of devotion and attention but deems ultimately unreachable. Caceres's introduction presents biographical information and situates Agustini's work and life in a larger political, historical, and literary context, particularly the modernismo movement, whose followers broke linguistic and political ties with the pathos and excesses of romanticism.

Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernández (Translated by Esther Allen)
Author(s) from: Uruguay
Setting: ???
Original Language: Spanish
First Publised: 1983
Description: Lands of Memory presents a half-dozen wonderful works by Felisberto Hernández, "a writer like no other," Italo Calvino declared, "like no European or Latin American. He is an 'irregular, ' who eludes all classifications and labelings—yet he is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books." Named a Guardian Best Book of the Year by Alfred Brendel and a TLS Best Book of the Year by Michael Hofmann (who calls Felisberto "a loopier, vegetarian Kafka, inhabiting his mazy personal baroque"), Lands of Memory collects four astonishing stories and the two dreamlike novellas "Around the Time of Clemente Colling" and "Lands of Memory."
Other Books by the Author(s): Piano Stories (1993)