Book excerpt: The Boom is the socio-literary movement that brought the Latin American writers Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortázar and the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo to fame during the 1960s. Prior studies of the Boom have essentially focused on the characteristics of the movement in Latin America and have been interested mainly in the originality or literary experimentalism of the Boom, in which these studies mirrored the ideals of the Cuban revolution. This groundbreaking book presents a history of the Boom in Spain as well as in Latin America and critiques the myth of originality of the Boom, which is only conventional inside the parameters of literary modernism. With this new perspective, the Boom appears as a manifestation of literary modernism, which repeats the history of the European avant-gardes of the second decade of the twentieth century.