The Latin-American novel is justifiably celebrated for its inventiveness and originality. Although some reviewers and critics identify the modern novel with ‘magic realism’, in fact this has become a catch-phrase which obscures the many varieties of fiction that have appeared over the last decades. Although in the early '60s, writers such as Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes and García Márquez were personal friends, they did not belong to a literary movement which could be labelled ‘magical realist’ in the way that Surrealist or Ultraist writing could be identified. What these writers shared, at least in their early work, was a conviction that literature was a privileged activity. The rapid cultural and social changes that took place in the '60s and '70s, their confrontation with mass culture genres that reached far greater publics than they could dream of, accounts for the difference between the earlier writing of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa (for example) and their more recent novels which register a change in style and are written for a different kind of public. Not only this but their celebrity status and their privileging of the novel has tended to overshadow the emergence of a generation of writers who were influenced by mass culture and also those writers of their own generation who wrote fiction in genres other than the novel, for example, Augusto Monterroso (Guatemala 1921–), Juan José Arreola (Mexico 1918–), Carlos Monsiváis (1940–), Rodolfo Walsh (1927–), and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (1946–).