I'd prefer Butterflies, as there is the whole political clash layered/driving with the everything, and that is definitely a Thing for me, and it isn't quite as front and center in GG (theirs is more social conflict.) Before We Were Free exists in the same frame of events as Butterflies. (You may know that, I didn't and I was reading along and hit the mention of butterflies and was all OMG. And I had to go make myself all puffy and rednosed reading Butterflies again.)

Actually, we teach Lolita, The Awakening, and both short stories you mention already.

The only thing I'm still wavering on is whether to switch Kindred with The Handmaid's Tale (since I will already be discussing race through Bluest Eye and HT will allow us to focus on gender).

There was a story going around the University of Alabama's English department while I was a student that Atwood had written A Handmaid's Tale while serving as a visiting professor there. Since my rabbit eared-TV could only get the local Fox affiliate and several local-access all-preacher, all-the-time channels, I could believe it.

I think Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the most accessible of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works, in my opinion. I read it in high school. I like Allende better though.

Well, you can certainly tie a lot of stuff in Handmaid's Tale to reality in many places all over the world that were happening both when she wrote it and today, which is always creepy and interesting...and depressing...

I'll go on record that I don't much care for Allende and love Garcia Marquez. I'm hit-or-miss on Fuentes. I like Borges, but find diminishing marginal returns on revisiting his work. Thus ends my knowledge of Latin American literature.

No, wait. I wrote that and realized that I've read something by Vargas Llosa , Octavio Paz, and Jorge Amado, too. But I'll be damned if I can remember much about them. Amado's book was about drunkards in Bahia, maybe? Hmmm.

I remember reading an interview with Atwood a few years after HT came out, in which she talked about going on the book tour on a few different continents. When she'd be in Europe/UK, readers would come up to her and say, "This'll never happen here." When she'd go to Canada, they'd say, "Do you think this could happen here?" When she'd go to the US, they'd come up to her and say, "When will this happen here?"

I read both Allende and Garcia Marquez when I was in high school and liked them both, but Garcia Marquez made much more of an impression on me. I didn't understand it all, of course (still don't!), but at the very least he's got a terrific sense of humor and I think kids relate to that.

I also had a teacher who was big into Raymond Carver so we read a lot of his short stories and I think they were great for High Schoolers because they're so tied to actual real life.

Oh Carver is perfect for the Fractured American Dream theme.

"The Wire," But I'm guessing you a. want your job still. and b. don't really buy the "visual novel" meme. So I'll pretend I can close "The Wire likes carrots," tag.