Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month 2022 with these books by Latinx authors

When I was a student in 1982 and taking a course on ancient American literature, the professor, a famous scholar of Whitman and Emerson, announced in his first lecture: “By the middle of the next century, literature American will be dominated by masters with the latest names like Álvarez, García and Díaz. Back then – when the major publishing houses printed perhaps a handful of books by Latino writers a year, and even among the most widely read American bibliophiles, few had wandered far beyond the magical Macondo of A hundred years of loneliness as far as Latin American literature was concerned, it was a bold and outrageous prophecy. Yet, still about three decades from the date of the culmination of this prophecy, writers such as National Book Award finalist Cristina García; Julia Alvarez; Hernan Diaz and Pulitzer nominee and Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz occupy a central position in the canon of contemporary American literature. They are paving the way for many of the writers listed below and are still very active in producing works that are sure to become fully integrated into the North American canon of the 21st century, as this wise professor predicted.

The works in the list below of the most notable Latinx books released in 2022, in hardcover or paperback, cover a wide range of issues and continue to expand the landscape of Latinx fiction from the cutting edge of North America. South to the inchoate canyons of Wall Street before the Great Depression. All, however, deal to some degree with the universal questions of home and existential themes of shifting identities and vagrant realities that have characterized Western literature ever since. The Odyssey. They are also forcing us as Americans to take a closer look at ourselves and reconsider how those voices that were once considered outsiders are now polishing our precious concepts of equality and the majestic poetry of freedom enshrined in the world. American DNA but too often muted.