Argentina's 95 percent literacy rate is one of the highest in the world and its many bookshops, especially the splendidly monumental ones in Buenos Aires, are a reflection of the considerable interest in what is written in both Argentina and the outside world. While Argentine nationals have won the Nobel prizes for chemistry, medicine and peace, none of the country's outstanding writers has ever been rewarded with the prize for literature - all the more galling for Argentines, given that two Chileans have been. Borges is the giant of Argentine literature, but he by no means dwarfs the country's other extremely original novelists and poets, many of whose works have been translated into English and make for highly readable companions during a visit to the country.

For much of the twentieth century Argentina's rich and varied literary production was dominated, for the outside world at least, by the country's greatest ever writer, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Borges is inextricably linked with Buenos Aires - a kind of anthropomorphic protagonist in much of his highly original prose and poetry. Like many of his compatriots, he was both fascinated and frustrated by the notion of the Argentine identity as a kind of extension of Europe, apparently incapable of throwing off the shackles of its immigrant past. Even now Argentine literature - mirroring general social concerns - often seems obsessed with the dichotomy between an archaic, thinly populated rural economy and one of the continent's biggest, most densely populated and modern cities, Buenos Aires. Ever since the country's independence in the early nineteenth century, there has been an ongoing civil war of sorts, between the provinces seeking more and more decentralized power, led in the early days by General Rosas and later by Perón, and a sophisticated metropolis apparently more interested in what is going on in Paris, London and Madrid, or more recently in New York, Miami and San Francisco, than in its vast and seemingly primitive hinterland.

The writer who first seems to have grasped this phenomenon is nineteenth-century Renaissance man Domingo Sarmiento (1811-88), Rosas' arch enemy and president of Argentina from 1868 to 1874. A no-nonsense autodidact from San Juan, he was almost obsessed with the idea that Argentina was condemned to backwater status and economic ruin unless it invested in education, overthrew the Federalists like Rosas (which he helped to bring about) and introduced elements of North American society, including what he saw as a proper democracy. His classic Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism , written while he was exiled in Chile in 1845, is a compendium of impressions about Argentina in the form of the romantic biography of a gaucho thug named Facundo Quiroga. A leitmotiv of the novel-cum-essay is the fact that Argentina's size is a curse rather than a blessing, hampering communications and making it possible for local strongmen like Quiroga (and Rosas) to flourish.

An even greater classic, regarded by many as Argentina's national literary work, is José Hernández 's Martín Fierro (1872), a novel in verse of epic proportions and traditionally learned by heart by many Argentines. Written as a protest against the corrupt authorities, it features a highly likeable gaucho outlaw on the run, who rails against the country's weak institutional structures and dictatorial rulers. One of the highlights is a lurid description of the hero's visit to an encomienda . Hernández (1834-86) published a second part, The Return of Martín Fierro , in 1879 but it lacked the drama of the earlier work. Written just before Martín Fierro , in 1870, is the equally gripping A Visit to the Ranquel Indians , by Lucio Mansilla (1831-1913). Taking the form of letters home to Buenos Aires, its anthropological descriptions are mingled with personal insights of a Porteño exposed for the first time to the realities of the country's far-flung outposts and indigenous peoples.

José Marmol's (1818-71) rambling Amalia: a Romance of the Argentine (Gordon Press, New York, 1977), written in exile, is a love story centred on the young heroine Amalia, while dealing with political intrigues under Rosas in the 1850s; while The Slaughter House (Las Américas, New York, 1959), was also written in exile and published posthumously in 1871 by an opponent of Rosas, the socialist poet Esteban Echeverría (1805-51) is a parable of the unspeakable brutality exacted by Rosas and his henchmen on a sensitive young man.

These preoccupations did not go away in the twentieth century. In 1926 Ricardo Guïraldes (1886-1927) was still writing about the gaucho way of life and the remoteness of rural Argentina in his elegiac Don Segundo Sombra: Shadows on the Pampa , whose eponymous hero is a guru-like figure and whose narrator is initiated in a range of manual and ethical skills to help him survive in the outback.

Argentina's Edgar Allen Poe, Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), wrote some vivid and at times lurid short stories set in Misiones province - The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (University of Texas Press, 1976). More recent still is leading writer Manuel Puig's (1932-1990) Heartbreak Tango: A Serial (1982), a mordant anatomy of a provincial mind seduced by the apparent glamour of Buenos Aires, with more musings about living in Argentina's extensive flat wilderness. Puig is best known for his superb Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1984), a convincing albeit surreal portrait of a political militant sharing a prison cell with a homosexual obsessed with Hollywood starlets and romantic movies, itself turned into a brilliant film directed by Hector Babenco in 1985, starring William Hurt and Raúl Julia. Set during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, the novel shows how the two forge an ever-closer relationship, exploited ruthlessly by the thuggish authorities. Juan José Saer (born 1937) has written a number of modernist works set in and around his native Santa Fe, such as The Event (Serpent's Tail, 1998), in which the light and landscape condition the minds of his aimless characters.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the phenomenal urban explosion in the capital had sparked off some of Argentina's most intriguing and original fiction. Several writers vie for the accolade of the city's bard. Leopoldo Marechal (1900-70) self-consciously titled his mock epic of daily life in Porteño suburbia Adán Buenosayres (1948), with a gallery of bohemian poets and larger-than-life story-tellers as its cast. Until his tragically early death, Roberto Arlt (1900-42) captured the lot of the poor immigrant, with his gripping if idiosyncratic novels about anarchists, investors, whores and other marginal characters in the mean streets of 1920s Buenos Aires, most pleasingly portrayed in The Seven Madmen (1972). Published in 1933, X-ray of the Pampa by essayist and poet Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (1895-1964) again examines, in a quirky way, the mutual ignorance of the capital and the cattle-country stretching for hundreds of kilometres to the west. His contemporary Eduardo Mallea (1903-82) wrote somewhat ponderous fiction along similar lines, of which the best example is his 1941 novel All Green Shall Perish . Buenos Aires in the 1950s was conjured up poignantly by Ernesto Sábato (born 1911) a physicist by profession whose writings explore the city's nostalgia and feeling of utter alienation in three seminal works, The Tunnel (Cape, 1980), On Heroes and Tombs (Cape, 1982) and The Angel of Darkness , (Cape, 1992). Julio Cortázar (1914-84) spent much of his career in Europe, but his 1966 novel Hopscotch , albeit manifestly influenced by the French existentialist movement led by Sartre and Camus, features unmistakably Porteño characters; his later short stories, some of them collected as Bestiary: Short Stories , continue to dramatize the tense relationship between the Europe of Argentina's human origins and the construction of a new country on an alien continent - his stories are one of the highpoints of twentieth-century literature.

While Borges' friend, confidante and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-99) should not be overlooked - seek out his weird novella The Invention of Morel (1985) or the equally off-the-wall The Dlary of the War of the Pig (1972) - it is Borges himself who put Argentine letters on the world map. Born in Buenos Aires, he spent his youth in Europe, mostly in Switzerland (where he died and is buried), and "rediscovered" Buenos Aires and its barrios upon his return in the 1920s. He started out as an avant-garde poet, translator, journalist and literary critic, but soon turned to quirky parables, with sardonic or provocative overtones and unexpected twists that had him described as a magic realist. His early poetry turns Buenos Aires and many of its sights - like La Recoleta cemetery and the Botanical Gardens - into semi-mythical beings, but his work as a whole sets up the city as a perplexing labyrinth. Another recurring theme is the idea of (national) identity as illusory, and he used his subtly allegorical style to criticize Perón's chauvinistic demagoguery - he had nothing but loathing for the president and the deified Evita. His teasing and certainly baffling Fictions and The Aleph are as good an introduction to his oeuvre as any; start with his own favourite story, The South .