When Courtney Henning Novak posted her Brazil video for the “Read Around Challenge,” she had no idea who Machado de Assis was. She expressed her amazement at his craft and, as expected, Brazilians flooded her comments suggesting she further explore our literary greats.

Anecdotes like this are common when people from the economic north discover LATAM authors. It’s how gringos talk about our art – especially when it’s from Brazil since most of our (Portuguese) writing doesn’t even travel around Latin America, let alone the U.S.

And while it is fun to share our stories with the rest of the world, I can’t help but wonder: how do they not know Machado de Assis, when I’m very familiar with Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Toni Morrison? The answer is disappointedly simple: Brazilian authors almost never reach American shelves.

Research tells us that even now – when globalization dictates almost every aspect of our daily lives – only about 3% of books are by foreign authors in U.S. bookstores. And from that number, around 45% hail from European cultural centers, such as Germany, Italy, and France.

Yes, these numbers are abysmally skewed and lingering on them won’t do any good. They are after all a symptom, not a cause.

So, what question should we be asking?

It’s simple, really. Why? Why are LATAM and particularly Brazilian books not reaching American shelves?

Gatekeeping

Publishers and agents still play a big part in deciding who gets the big marketing push and they’d much rather bet on an already established name than a name most people (in the U.S.) are unfamiliar with.

And I can understand the business logic behind it! Yet, I can’t help but think about the discrepancy between the amount of translated work that arrives in the U.S. and the gigantic numbers of English-to-other-language translations that reach almost every other country.

CEATL (European Council of Literary Translators’ Association) has reported that in places like Italy, up to 50% of books are English-to-Italian translations and this number goes up to 80% in smaller countries. For reference, of the top 5 most bought books in Brazil last year, three were by American authors, one by an English author and only one was by a Brazilian author (who isn’t really a writer by trade, but an evangelical pastor).

These numbers show that people from different cultures not only can, but do read outside their own culture. Which undermines one of the biggest excuses publishers use: “No one knows/understands these authors!”

Like D.P. Snyder beautifully put it, this is The Ignorance Plea. An argument that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, where publishers claim American audiences don’t know/understand an author like Machado de Assis, and because of that never publish them, taking away the chance for American readers to understand and love de Assis.

Personally, I think this excuse is offensive to U.S. readers, underestimating their intelligence and abilities.

Mea Culpa

Making matters worse is the fact that many Latin American publishing houses do not know how to collaborate with English-based publishers. And that’s clear because many Latin American authors, who could break into the English-speaking market, lack the necessary support to translate, package, and market their work.

The reasons for such neglect range from: publishers claiming not to have the money (which is not entirely true, as they manage just fine to publish English language books in Portuguese-speaking markets), the U.S. audience doesn’t have any interest in foreign books (the Ignorance Plea, again!) or, simply, they don’t know how to sell translated works.

And while the first two of these claims can be refuted as simply unproven, the last one is purely disappointing. After all, isn’t writing a craft based on the assumption of creativity? Where authors get to dream of worlds and take readers on a journey? So, are the people responsible for sharing these worlds so lacking in imagination that they can’t find a way to sell them? Talk about a failure to live your values.

It Gets Worse

Unfortunately, we’re also just facing a reduction in readership. In the last four years, Brazil lost almost 7 million readers and the UK saw a decrease of 8,8% of readers from 2024 to 2025, with 46% of its population declaring to not have finished a single book in 2023.

The common wisdom goes that people are reading fewer books, in part, because reading a novel takes more effort than scrolling through social media. Our phones and tablets are designed to be addictive, a page with printed symbols is not. As our minds are re-wired to consume information in audio/video content, we get accustomed to arguments shrunken down to bullet points and quotable sentences, all consumed while we finish up some chore – the opposite of books that demand our full attention and time.

Folks also blame pricing. While social media is free, reading requires some level of disposable income, they say, either for buying a physical book or paying for subscriptions like Kindle Unlimited, where you can borrow up to 20 books at a time.

And while both things can be obstacles, I believe they are far from the actual reason the numbers are so low.

The real issue is not a lack of interest or means – because GenZ/Alpha find books sexy and libraries are still very much a thing – but rather a lack of incentive. In fact, the U.S. government (and its copiers) is showing a brazen distaste for books.

I’m not a U.S. citizen, yet I have been bombarded with news of banned books and prohibited words on government websites. A truly Orwellian dystopia (but they wouldn’t know, as they don’t read).

These kinds of bans are not happenstance, they are targeted, targeting very specific stories. Take the 2023-2024 US banned books list, where up to 44% were books by authors of color and 39% had LGBTQIA+ characters featured in them.

Not only that, these bans are intended to discredit reading as a whole. You see, information is power, and the wider our sources, the more informed the decisions we make. It might seem like a stretch to say novels are a cornerstone of democracy, but when you think about their ability to see us outside ourselves and ponder new possibilities, it doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.

Learning about other people’s reality goes far beyond a novelty. In a world where powerful people want us to not think beyond the next thing on our feeds – which have been extensively curated by power-hungry billionaires – seeking more in-depth knowledge is an act of rebellion, radical empathy, and freedom.

So, the next time you get a chance, go to the international section of your local library, seek out authors whose names you don’t know how to pronounce (maybe like Machado de Assis), and allow yourself to travel through their words.