This course studies Spanish American texts written during the last two decades by such authors as novelists Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and playwright Sabina Berman. While contemporary writers had long labored under the shadow cast by the international reputation of the Boom novelists and other Latin American authors of the 1960s, the rise of Bolaño as a world author has generated a new wave of interest in Latin American literature as a principal contributor to the current literary scene. This course fulfills the Literature elective requirement in Literary Studies.