El Salvador: The Face of Revolution, by Robert Armstrong & Janet Shenk, is a very readable history of the country, focusing on the roots and reasons behind the recent civil war.I Was Never Alone: A Prison Diary from El Salvador is a first-person account of life in a women's prison during the war, written by Nidia Diaz, a guerrilla commander shot and captured by the military in 1985.Joan Didion's Salvador is a laconic, piercing portrait of El Salvador in 1982, which avoids breast-beating its way to the moral high ground by using well-honed skills of allusion and irony.Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Soccer War is a brilliant report of the 1969 conflict between El Salvador and Honduras which captures both the farce and the atrocious historical causes of the conflict. The article is included in the anthology of Best of Granta Reportage.So Far From God by Patrick Marnham is an unflinching and lucid appraisal of Central America, its Spanish legacy, its current problems and its troubled relationship with the US.PJ O'Rourke is more blunt and much more funny in Holidays in Hell.Exiled novelist and poet Manlio Argueta is one of El Salvador's finest writers. His banned novel One Day of Life is a down-to-earth portrayal of peasant life in the country.One of the country's most influential poets is Roque Dalton, whose works include Poemas Clandestinas.Cuentos de Barro by Salvador Salazar Arrué (writing under the pen name of Salarué) marks the beginning of the modern Central American short-story genre.