Guatemalan novelist, poet, and critic Mario Roberto Morales is one of the leading representatives of the nueva novela (New Novel) in Central American fiction. He combines the linguistic, temporal, and structural experimentation of the Latin-American Boom fiction of the 1960s with testimonial/autobiographical accounts of the political and social turmoil of the region. His prize-winning novels have attracted national and international critical attention, and some of his work has already been translated into English, a sure sign of his growing importance in Central American letters.

His book of short poems Epigramas para interrogar a Patricia (1982) was published in English as "Epigrams to Interrogate Patricia" in 1990 in the Latin American Literary Review. Asa Zatz published an English version of one of his short stories in And We Sold the Rain: Contemporary Fiction from Central America (1988). In addition, a chapter from his early novel Los demonios salvajes (The Wild Devils...