Gabriel García Márquez prepared a place in the world for Latin American literature. Before him came Borges, Carpentier, Rulfo, Cortázar, Onetti, Sábato, Asturias, Marechal, Paz, Vallejo, Huidobro and so many others. It can be argued that he is the greatest of them all, but he alone wrote 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', a bombshell of expansive resonance that made European readers get a concrete idea of the continent for decades. Since then, nothing has been the same for the public and for Latin American writers. The image of a mythical Macondo, with its interchangeable pairs of men and women, its sudden magics and its apocalyptic nature became so famous that fiction replaced immediate reality. No wonder: that is what has always happened with truly substantial literature.

He did not invent magical realism (there are many previous examples), but he integrated it into his own world and made it international. From his 1967 novel Desmesurada, publishers embarked on the search for a new gold of the Indies and epigones of the stones began to emerge. The most famous of all was a Chilean novelist who built her house of spirits with the same materials as Macondo. Thus was consecrated a literature "in the manner of" that, however, never lived up to its founding father. This, unfortunately, was almost inevitable. García Márquez had achieved the rare goal of demonstrating to the world that having a writing staff did not prevent him from being a bestseller.

However, Hispanic American literature has been developing over the last decades with the same fecundity as always. Many names have emerged on the fringes of magical realism, which in a way belongs to another era. Quite a few have picked up the baton and have given it a voice of their own. This is what happens in authors, apparently very different, such as the Cuban Leonardo Padura or the Peruvian Benavides. Some of García Márquez's recurring themes, such as violence or eroticism, have been recycled and adapted to new historical circumstances. In Colombia itself, where Gabo has become a national myth, there are writers who, without renouncing their own substratum, have been adding new territories to continental literature. Juan Gabriel Vásquez is an example of this: his cosmopolitanism and elegant style expose the ills of a disjointed society, in crisis with no point of return. Of course, the issue of important writers who have appeared in the last thirty years, after the Nobel awarded to García Márquez, is countless: Bolaño, Paz Soldán, Neuman, Valenzuela, Shúa, Fogwill, de Mattos, Halfón, Liano, Gomes, Goldemberg, Bellatin, Ungar, Portela, etc. The challenge of all of them has been to build stories without resorting to the usual baroque formulas and at the same time be loyal to the surrounding environment. Just as García Márquez was in his day.