Mexican authors take center stage in the news today! Two award-winning Mexican novelists, Álvaro Enrigue and Cristina Rivera Garza, take on historical fiction in very different, but equally inventive, ways. Their historical fiction novels may defy categorization, but that only makes them all the more interesting. Find out why from expert book reviews and interviews below.

That, and learn more about Gonzalo Celorio, the Mexican writer who was recently named the newest Cervantes Prize winner, becoming the most recent recipient of one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of Hispanic literature.

Absurdism Transforms Álvaro Enrigue’s Historical Fiction

Where is the line between fact in historical fiction and all-out fantasy? There are the obvious historical fantasy books that blend the two genres equally, and magical realism/fabulism is a staple subgenre that combines historical settings with touches of everyday magic, but what about the books that re-envision history? Alternate history tends to straddle that line, straying sometimes farther into one side or the other, but authors like Álvaro Enrigue do it with such a masterful hand that it starts to feel less like what could have been and more like what should have been.