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 culminated in his bid for the Peruvian presidency in 1990

The latest masterpiece — perceptive, funny, insightful, affecting — from the Nobel Prize — winning author. Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s newest novel, The Discreet Hero, follows two fascinating characters whose lives are destined to intersect: neat, endearing Felícito Yanaqué, a small businessman in Piura, Peru, who finds himself the victim of blackmail; and Ismael Carrera, a successful owner of an insurance company in Lima, who cooks up a plan to avenge himself against the two lazy sons who want him dead. Felícito and Ismael are, each in his own way, quiet, discreet rebels: honorable men trying to seize control of their destinies in a social and political climate where all can seem set in stone, predetermined. They are hardly vigilantes, but each is determined to live according to his own personal ideals and desires — which means forcibly rising above the pettiness of their surroundings. The Discreet Hero is also a chance to revisit some of our favorite players from previous Vargas Llosa novels: Sergeant Lituma, Don Rigoberto, Doña Lucrecia, and Fonchito are all here in a prosperous Peru. Vargas Llosa sketches Piura and Lima vividly — and the cities become not merely physical spaces but realms of the imagination populated by his vivid characters. A novel whose humor and pathos shine through in Edith Grossman’s masterly translation, The Discreet Hero is another remarkable achievement from the finest Latin American novelist at work today

At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man…that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an old school friend, Saul Zuratas. As recollections of Zuratas flow through his mind, the writer begins to imagine Zuratas's transformation from a modern to a central member of the unacculturated Machiguenga tribe. Weaving the mysteries of identity, storytelling, and truth, Vargas Llosa has created a spellbinding tale of one man's journey from the modern world to our origins, abandoning one in order to find meaning in both

In these three plays — each introduced by the author — Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed novelist and a cultural and political figure in Peru, explores the complexities of Peruvian society and the writer's imagination

One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness to The Tin Drum and Herzog and major works by Hemingway, Woolf, Orwell, Camus and Nabokov. There are long studies of George Grosz, vignettes on Botero and Picasso, and an appreciation of Cezanne and Van Gogh, including a visit to Cezanne's homes in the South Seas. Also included are essays on political and social thinkers, from the nineteenth-century feminist, Flora Tristan, to Isaiah Berlin, and contemporary pieces on 9/11, the aftermath of the war in Iraq, and the terrorist attacks on London and Madrid. Fantastically intelligent, inspired and surprising, Touchstones is a landmark collection from one of the world's leading intellectuals