"During my childhood I got the best of my information about exotic countries not from textbooks but by reading the adventure novels of Jules Verne, Emilio Salgari and Karl May."

~ Umberto Eco

"I spent a large part of my childhood in my grandfather's library, devouring the adventure classics of Alexandre Dumas, Emilio Salgari, Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson."

~ Arturo Perez Reverte

From ages one to ten I lived in Cochbamba, Bolivia. With regard to that city, where I was innocent and happy, I remember not so much the things that I did and the people that I knew, but rather the books that I read: Sandokan, Nostradamus, The Three Musketeers, Cagliostro, Tom Sawyer, Sinbad. Stories of pirates, explorers and bandits, romantic love … occupied the best part of my time. And because it was intolerable that these magic books should come to an end, I sometimes invented new chapters for them, or else changed the ending. Those additions and corrections to other people’s stories were the first pieces that I wrote, the first signs of my vocation as a story-teller.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Making Waves: Essays

"When I was your age, Salgari's books were my passion, they will become yours as well."

~ Che Guevara while reading bedtime stories to his daughter Hilda.

Beyond its value as art, literature can be a way to know and approximate the "other"—to penetrate his consciousness and live his dramas. Thus the "other" changes from a stranger—suspicious, antagonistic, threatening—to someone known and familiar; in this way, literature fosters tolerance. How can anyone whose youthful hero was the Malay Prince Sandokan, born of the fancy prose of the Italian novelist Emilio Salgari, be a racist? How can anyone touched by the eloquent pages of Anne Frank's diary become an anti-Semite? How can anyone who has admired Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme, or Mario Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo—all literary sagas about Latin American dictators—favor military rule? Through its literature, a country knows itself. Life raised to the level of art—whether happy, positive, or regrettable—becomes shared experience, part of memory, elements of a common emotional range. And in the long run it is a pillar of democracy and tolerance. Even peace.

Secret Histories
On the creation of a Colombian national identity through crime fiction.

Santiago Gamboa, Boston Review