Mario Vargas Llosa
Story Stream
Vargas Llosa: The Man Who Broke From the Tribe May 01, 2025
In one of the many interviews I had with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, he said he hoped death would surprise him with a pen in his hand. I can’t say whether that dream came true, but what is certain is that Llosa likely had little left to write...
The Last of the Boom April 23, 2025
Writer, Nobel laureate, and sometime Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa died last week at the age of eighty-nine. He was the last surviving member of the “Boom,” a dazzling generation of Latin American novelists who made their name in...
The Great Neoliberal Novelist April 16, 2025
In a controversial 1986 essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” the late literary critic Frederic Jameson argued that while the literature of the industrialized West had largely retreated from its political vocation, t...
Farewell to the Last Writer of the Latin American Boom April 15, 2025
Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading...
