Daniel Saldaña París's novel, Among Strange Victims, is a shaggy picaresque featuring devilishly clever syntax and a charming, hilarious tendency to digress.

Saldaña París, born in Mexico City and now a resident of Montreal, picks 10 essential Spanish-language books.

Let’s forget, for a moment, about Gárcia Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and other names that inevitably show up on lists of this kind. I’ve always believed that every writer—every reader, too—should be honest with himself in choosing his “essential books,” deciding what novels speak to him most intimately. Sometimes this exercise transcends personal taste, and those books find a collective resonance.

New English translations of some books from the Spanish-speaking world oblige readers to rediscover a continent. Anyone who encounters these ten titles will find one possible map for navigating the seas of literature written in Spanish. One warning: no one returns from this journey unscathed.

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