Novels for the End of a World is an introduction to the twenty-first century novel as written and published across the Spanish-speaking world. It's also an argument for reading narrative fiction from Spain and Latin America as a single entity. Where once we analyzed literature within narrow national traditions, today’s best-seller lists, literary prize money, and even the tales themselves point to the need for more holistic approaches. So too the themes they explore. Today’s writers and readers inhabit a global world where our sense of space and time shrinks at exponential rates. At the same time so much of daily experience continues to be lived locally and, as always, with often overwhelming affect. Given that, it shouldn´t surprise us to find common threads and themes running across narrative fiction from Madrid to Mexico, from Argentina to Asturias, and yet to find at each stop these themes registered through intensely and intimately local stories. In this way, Novels for the End of a World becomes at once an overview of major trends in narrative across the Spanish-speaking world and a trip through the rich, wide variety of local life. Arising out of this literary adventure is one thread common to all: that beyond the end is a barely distinguishable glimmer of light, a sign of new ways for a new world.