South America has produced some of the most extraordinary literature of the past century. Start with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude — it's the book that defined magical realism and captures the surreal, layered quality of life in Colombia better than any travel guide could. Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits does something similar for Chile. Jorge Luis Borges' short stories are set in Buenos Aires and beyond, bending reality in ways that feel oddly appropriate once you've spent time on the continent. Mario Vargas Llosa's novels paint vivid pictures of Peru — try The Feast of the Goat or Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
For travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia is the classic — a strange, elliptical journey through southern Argentina and Chile that defined a genre. It's more impressionistic than practical, but it captures the end-of-the-world feeling of Patagonia perfectly. Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express traces a train journey from Boston to the tip of South America and is at its best in the South American stretches. More recently, Mark Adams' Turn Right at Machu Picchu is a funny, well-researched account of retracing Hiram Bingham's steps in Peru.
Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America is essential background reading. It's a passionate, angry account of how five centuries of exploitation shaped the continent. It's polemical — Galeano himself later said he'd outgrown some of it — but it provides context you won't get elsewhere. For a deeper look at the colonial period, Charles Mann's 1491 and 1493 reshape your understanding of the pre-Columbian Americas and what happened after contact.
If you're heading into the wild, pick up David Grann's The Lost City of Z, about Percy Fawcett's doomed Amazon expeditions — it reads like a thriller and makes the jungle feel both alluring and terrifying. For the natural world, Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata's Tropical Nature is a superb introduction to rainforest ecology. Henry Walter Bates' 19th-century The Naturalist on the River Amazons remains one of the great accounts of exploring Brazil's interior.
Finally, for food — a growing reason to visit — pick up a copy of Virgilio Martinez's Central, which explores Peru's extraordinary culinary biodiversity through the lens of one of the world's best restaurants. For Argentine food culture, Francis Mallmann's Seven Fires captures the open-flame cooking tradition of the pampas and Patagonia in a way that will have you booking a flight to Buenos Aires.