Given the international recognition and critical acclaim that Marías has received (and in particular, beginning with the publication of Todas las almas in 1989), the relatively small amount of critical study devoted to his work is somewhat unexpected. Much of the work is in Spanish, but because of the growing number of his novels translated in English, and especially because of his strong reception in Great Britain and Ireland, critical reading in English has become increasingly relevant to Marías studies over the past decade.

For readers wishing to place Marías in his Spanish context, but who are not familiar with post-Franco Spain, the subsequent transition to democracy, and the paroxysm of cultural and social change that quickly followed, several collections of essays exist that explore various aspects of contemporary Spain. Two of the best that cover much of the cultural terrain are Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi, and Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. In addition to placing Marías in the cultural landscape of Spain, readers may also want to locate his fiction historically within the development of the Spanish novel from the late Franco years to the twenty-first century. This is especially pertinent to the understanding of Marías's writing. With the exception of novelists such as Cervantes in the seventeenth century, Leopoldo Alas in the nineteenth century, and a handful of writers (including his principal mentor, Juan Benet) in the twentieth, he has publicly and frequently rejected nearly the entire body of canonical fiction in Spain.