Step aside, Coronel Aureliano Buendía, fighter of 32 fictional battles, Latin America's conqueror of the literary hearts and minds of the world. The legendary figure of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book that single-handedly brought readers to their knees, has competition. Or so claims Planeta, the largest Spanish-language publisher and distributor of Spanish books in the United States, which has introduced a new legion of Colombian writers to this country. Hailed as the new boom, this post–García Márquez group, these antimagical realists, have garnered feature articles in The New York Times and invitations to speak at international writers' conferences.

Over the past few years, this handful of writers, all male, unsurprisingly, and all 40 years old or younger, have captured hemispheric territory that ranges from their native Colombia all the way up to Mexico and down to Argentina. Spain, the old motherland and very important for a literary career in Spanish, has honored them with the most prestigious awards. Jorge Franco's lyrical and heartbreaking novella, Rosario Tijeras (reviewed on p.33), a love triangle between two upper-class young men and a 15-year-old girl-killer set in violent, post– Pablo Escobar Medellín, won the 2000 Premio de Novela Dashiell Hammett Prize in Gijón, Spain.

Mario Mendoza's Satanás (Satan, Críticas, July/Aug. 2002), a chilling, rambling psychological thriller based on real events, was awarded Seix Barral's 2002 Premio Biblioteca Breve, the crown jewel of Spanish literary awards, a sort of National Book Award for unpublished fiction, last year. Mendoza shares the prize with such luminaries as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. More important, not only are these writers getting recognition but, as Planeta's U.S. sales director Marla Norman bluntly puts it, "they're selling." Hoping for the same to happen here, Planeta has bought their backlists and reprinted their best sellers for Spanish-speaking book buyers in the United States. "It is not just a marketing plan," says Norman, speaking from her office in Miami. "It is a reaction to the international attention they are receiving. People are asking for the books. As a publisher, you feel the momentum building and you want to capitalize on that. There is no other country I know of in Latin America where so many authors are coming from."

The trend began, as many of these things do, through a combination of individual tenacity and lucky coincidence. All these authors had a first work of some kind published, either a collection of short stories or a first novel, that had come and gone pretty much unnoticed. But García Márquez's success had cast a long shadow across the country's literary life, and even if there were new Colombian novelists, Colombians were not reading them. "Readers weren't recognizing Colombia in their work," explains Jorge Franco, the accidental pioneer of the new wave. "Instead of writing stories, they were being existentialists."

Franco reversed the trend. He knew he wanted to write about the Medellín of his youth, the Medellín of the mid- '80s, when drug lord Pablo Escobar controlled the town and going out to a bar could mean ending up on the floor skirting bullets from a drug brawl. "It was safer to stay home," recalls Franco, speaking from his quiet retreat on the outskirts of Bogotá, where he now lives. "But who wants to do that when you're young?" To explain what happens to a city when two worlds collide—the entrepreneurial and decent Medellín that Franco was part of and the Medellín that reveres ruthless violence and easy money that was taking over—Franco wrote Rosario Tijeras. Franco describes a Colombia where teenage hitmen, like Rosario (it was important to him that the hitman be female) dip their bullets in holy water for luck and kill either for a new pair of Nikes or to bring food home to their mothers' tables. "That part is all true," explains Franco, who got the idea for the novel while reading a friend's graduate thesis about girl violence. "What I had to come up with was the love story." Franco believes that Rosario Tijeras became an overnight success because it finally took readers inside a Colombia they could recognize. It posed the questions everyone was grappling with. It was about the disintegration of Colombia's value system in the face of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. It was about a Colombia where stereo music played over the grave of a drug lord 24 hours a day; a Colombia where teenagers are paid in pocket money for every cop killed; a Colombia that everyone knew and struggled to understand.

Although Fernando Vallejo's La virgen de los sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) portrayed Colombia this way, no publisher could have anticipated the instant success that Franco's name would bring. Franco had to convince the small publishing house that had published his first book to print 1,000 copies of Rosario Tijeras for the 1999 Bogotá Book Fair. He cut a deal with the house: The publisher would print the copies and Franco would pay for all promotion and publicity. "They were spending it all on Isabel Allende," recalls Franco. For months, he peddled the book, dropping it off at newspapers and magazines, handing it out to whoever he thought could help. He ran into the wife of the editor of El Tiempo, Colombia's main newspaper, in an elevator and gave her a copy, asking if she would pass it on to her husband. Two weeks later, he got an admiring phone call from the editor, who promised to do something. But Franco never thought the editor would dedicate an entire column to Rosario Tijeras. The book sold out in two days. Today it has sold more than 100,000 copies, unprecedented for any Colombian writer other than Gabriel García Márquez.

Then came Mario Mendoza's Satanás (Satan, Críticas, July/Aug. 2002), another look at gritty life in Colombia. His book sprang from an infamous day in Bogotá's history, December 5 1986, when a Vietnam vet went on a killing rampage. After shooting and burning his mother and six other people, Campo Elías Delgado, 52 years old, sat down to dinner at a popular Italian restaurant in an upscale neighborhood in Bogotá. He finished dessert, stood up, removed a .32 gun from his bag and opened fire, killing 26 people and wounding another dozen. Fifteen minutes later, the police killed him.

A 22-year-old Mario Mendoza, a doctoral student with literary ambitions, was watching the nightly news when the horrific excess came on the screen and the name of the killer was reported. It could not be. Campo Elías Delgado was the quiet guy, 30 years his senior, who had befriended him. "We weren't good friends. He didn't allow friendships, but we were more than acquaintances and we shared bibliographies for our respective theses," says Mendoza, who is so busy these days dashing from conferences to lunches and from the airport to another international engagement that he speaks as fast as a machine gun. Mendoza's thesis compared Edgar Allen Poe and Carlos Fuentes. Delgado's was about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "Having that piece of information haunted me. The news only concentrated on the Vietnam vet part. I knew about his literary obsessions."

Telling the story of Delgado's demons became his obsession. A year after the massacre, he sat down to write the book but gave up after 40 pages. "I wasn't ready," he admits. Fifteen years later he tried again, and without any fanfare submitted the manuscript for the Seix Barral prize in Barcelona. "I knew that it was the prize that I had to strive for," he says. The Biblioteca Breve is definitely an important point of reference for young Latin American writers. It was the calling card of the boom writers. "It was the only thing that would get me known," says Mendoza. Franco was already bathing in success, and Santiago Gamboa, his college friend who lived in Europe, was being published and talked about in Colombia. "I was completely unknown." When the prize was announced, "no one had heard of me," he says, enjoying the story of his success.

It was then that Planeta's director in Colombia, Gabriel Iriarte, "a man with a great sense of smell," says Mendoza, realized that there was "something happening" and signed up the young authors. Santiago Gamboa had made a name for himself writing war dispatches from Bosnia and as a columnist for a weekly magazine. His books ranged from Páginas de vuelta (Returning Pages, Críticas, Sept./Oct. 2003), a fragmented novel about local customs and alienation in Bogotá, to his latest, Los impostores (The Impostors, Críticas, July/Aug. 2002), a classic noir thriller with pretensions set in China. Efraim Medina Reyes, the rowdiest of the lot, writes rambunctious and plotless rants with moments of powerful prose and insightful social commentary. He is the Sid Vicious wannabe, the perfect media darling with the irreverent sound bites. "García Márquez should do something for Colombia and donate himself to a museum." And the catchy titles. His latest is Técnicas de masturbación entre Batman y Robin (Masturbation Techniques Between Batman and Robin , p.38), which sports a naked Medina on the cover.

Enrique Serrano is his antithesis, dealing with serious subjects in a serious tone. His books evoke important historical figures, such as Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turkish conqueror. In De parte de Dios (On God's Side, Críticas, Sept./Oct. 2002), a reflective creative essay about the divine, Kierkegaard, Simeon, Basho, and Aryabbhata all make appearances. A few more journalists with novellas, like Ricardo Silva and Fernando Quiroz, join the joyride of sales and media attention. Both authors deal with men in relationships with women. Silva's Tic (p.43) is an accurate portrait of a male louche, a Colombian of a certain ilk who wakes up one morning to find himself in the shoes of his kids' pediatrician. Quiroz's En esas andaba cuando la vi (That's Where I Was When I Saw Her, p.43) is a look at obsession in the time of war, telling the story of a young man who flees Colombia after his wife is killed. While in Buenos Aires, he thinks he has found love again and brings his new girlfriend back to Bogotá. But his need to overprotect her from car bombs (the writer claims Bogotá is too dangerous), proves too much for his Argentine lover, who feels trapped instead of loved.

Cambio, one of Colombia's weekly magazines, dedicated a cover to these Colombian writers, calling them "los nuevos," or the new ones. It labels Franco, Mendoza, Gamboa, and Serrano the "los abanderados," or the standard bearers, the champions. Cambio's list, which included Julio Paredes and Antonio García and noted the absence of female voices, is about 10 names longer than Planeta's.

"We were recuperating readers," says Gamboa, remembering the day he presented Mendoza's Relato de un asesino (The Chronicle of an Assasin, Seix Barral, 2001), his first published attempt to tell the story of Campo Elías Delgado. The auditorium was packed. Thousands of young readers came, recalls Gamboa. After the presentation, "they came up to Mario for an autograph but also to me and to Franco, who was in the front row. A reader of mine was also a reader of Franco and a reader of Franco was a reader of Mendoza." Colombia was again reading, and reading its own. Their success traveled. Europe started noticing and translated their books. Gamboa's Los impostores has been translated into 11 languages. Only Franco, however, has been translated into English. Rosario Tijeras will be published by Seven Stories Press and Paraíso Travel (Paradise Travel, Seix Barral, 2001), a story about a couple's ordeal in traveling from Colombia to Queens in search of the American dream, is being translated by Gregory Rabassa for Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Still, if American publishing houses have not shown much interest in translating their work, which might indicate how difficult it will be for these new Colombian writers to cross over to the English-language market, Planeta is interested in bringing them to America. After all, everyone in the publishing industry has tried to figure out a way to capture the Latino market, which, at 37 million people, is not insignificant. Planeta does not own rights to Franco's Rosario Tijeras but is banking on Mendoza, who has racked up the most sales of the group. Despite the lack of publicity, "Satanás has sold 3,000 in one year," explains Norman. "For a Spanish-language title in this country, this is very good. There's no doubt that its having been awarded the prize was a major force driving the sales." Mendoza's success with Satanás has helped focus attention here on the other young Colombian authors, just as it did in Colombia. "People started asking, 'Who are these guys? How can we get their books?'" Santiago Gamboa's Páginas de vuelta, for example, which was already available in this country, did not sell a single copy the year it was released. This year, it has sold almost 1,000 copies.

Readers will be disappointed if they expect to find the magical realism that has been synonymous with Latin American literature since the early 1970s, when García Márquez introduced the genre and Isabel Allende took it over. The stories and the characters of these new Colombian novelists are dark, gritty, intriguing, even transgressive. These writers stay away from the ephemeral beauties who eat dirt, the aunts who speak to the dead, and the priests who levitate. Their beauties are proctologists and killers; their aunts are middle-class city dwellers with TV sets; and their priests go window-shopping and are tempted by the carnal. Relatives die in acts of terrorism, not in plagues of biblical proportions. A scene or reference to a car bomb explosion figures in most of the books. The rape scenes, the killings, the bomb explosions forsake the ornate language of magical realism and read like scenes from a script or a cold police report. "There is a nonfiction tradition in Colombia that is very powerful," says Tom Colchie, a literary agent who specializes in Latin American authors and represents Franco, "and it definitely has had an influence on these authors."

Releasing themselves from the bondage of magical realism is a good thing. The industry pigeonholed everything into magical realism, explains Colchie, and it started to backfire as a marketing tool. "It became a kind of putdown," he says. "Publisher's Weekly started describing a book by saying it was for those who liked magical realism. It wasn't selling."

It wasn't the Colombians who came up with the idea of denouncing magical realism. Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet and Edmundo Paz Soldán, a Bolivian writing from the United States, edited a collection of short stories by young writers from Latin America and called it McOndo, because it seemed closer to McDonald's than to García Márquez's imaginary hamlet. In Mexico a few years later, a group spoofing the boom writers called itself "El crack" and wrote a manifesto calling for the death of flying dictators in Latin American literature.

Killing literary fathers is essential and perhaps a bit easy. Producing fresh, original work requires more than a media campaign. All these writers are still, critics and experts believe, on probation. "All of them have readers, even fans," says Mario Jursich, editor of El Malpensante, Colombia's main literary magazine. "They are considered important and there is the hope that one day they will give us an enormous surprise. But for the time being, some more than others have written 'correct books,' entertaining books, but none has written anything that resembles No One Writes to the Colonel, one of García Márquez's first books, and, of course, nothing that closely resembles any of his more ambitious works."

If García Márquez made his mark on the world of Colombian and then international letters by grounding his work in the manners and oral traditions of a pastoral Colombia, then this new generation, more realist than magical, has centered itself in a contemporary urban world. One thing is certain: They have a lot to work with. Coming from Colombia gives them an advantage as writers, a terribly sad advantage but an advantage nonetheless. Like Andrés, the main character in Mario Mendoza's Relato de un asesino, an alienated artist who lives in the marginal underworld of Bogotá amid poverty, prostitutes, thugs, loners, police brutality, and street crime, they all grapple with one question: "What is it with this country that seems unredeemably condemned to ruin and unhappiness? Why don't we advance? What sinister complot keeps us caught deep inside generalized chaos, corruption, and social entropy? Why do politicians and big businesses keep milking our country without giving it a break, without giving it the possibility to reorganize and obtain redemption?"

As their prominence continues to rise, they have the opportunity—no matter what style, city, or century they decide to live in as writers—to use their literary resources to tackle this harsh Colombian reality. And in bringing their work to the United States, Planeta is allowing new readers to discover the fruits of this difficult but ultimately powerful source of literary inspiration.

Silvana Paternostro is a Colombian-born writer living in New York. She wrote In the Land of God and Man: A Latin Woman's Journey (Plume) and is working on a book about Colombia.