Deep within the remote backlands of nineteenth-century Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There...

This wonderful detective novel is set in Peru in the 1950s. Near an Air Force base in the northern desert, a young airman is found murdered. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma investigate. Lacking a squad car, they have to cajole a local cabbie...

Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two ar...

With meticulous observation and the seductive skill of a great storyteller, Vargas Llosa lures the reader into the shadow of perversion that, little by little, darkens the extraordinary happiness and harmony of his characters. The mysterious nat...

Mario Vargas Llosa condenses a lifetime of writing, reading, and thought into an essential manual for aspiring writers. Drawing on the stories and novels of writers from around the globe—Borges, Bierce, CÉline, CortÁzar, Faulkner...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007 "Splendid, suspenseful, and irresistible . . . A contemporary love story that explores the mores of the urban 1960s--and 70s and 80s."-- The New York Times Book Review Ricardo Somoc...

This delightful farce opens as the prim and proper Captain Pantoja learns he is to be sent to Peru’s Amazon frontier on a secret mission for the army—to provide females for the amorous recruits. Side-splitting complications arise as...

The Cubs and Other Stories is Mario Vargas Llosa’s only volume of short fiction available in English. Vargas Llosa’s domain is the Peru of male youth and machismo, where life’s dramas play themselves out on the soccer field...

Set in Lima, the novel tells of a love story whose participants may be the fictional characters of Don Rigoberto. With his usual sly assurance, Vargas Llosa keeps the reader guessing which episodes are real and which issue from the Don's imagina...

Mario Vargas Llosa's A Fish in the Water is a twofold book: a memoir of one of Latin America's most celebrated witers, beginning with his birth in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru; and the story of his organization of the reform movement which culminate...