![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Showing 1 - 25 of 83 matches in All Departments
In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel Laureate maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and departure from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth. Writers like Adam Smith, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin helped the author navigate through these uneasy years of intellectual formation. They showed him another school of thought that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class or party, and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal and philosophical ideology. Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's greatest living novelists, but, as Clive James wrote in Cultural Amnesia, his 'true strength' is 'undoubtedly in the essay'.
'The Feast of the Goat will stand out as the great emblematic novel of Latin America's twentieth century and removes One Hundred Years of Solitude of that title.' Times Literary Supplement Urania Cabral, a New York lawyer, returns to the Dominican Republic after a lifelong self-imposed exile. Once she is back in her homeland, the elusive feeling of terror that has overshadowed her whole life suddenly takes shape. Urania's own story alternates with the powerful climax of dictator Rafael Trujillo's reign. In 1961, Trujillo's decadent inner circle (which includes Urania's soon-to-be disgraced father) enjoys the luxuries of privilege while the rest of the nation lives in fear and deprivation. As Trujillo clings to power, a plot to push the Dominican Republic into the future is being formed. But after the murder of its hated dictator, the Goat, is carried out, the Dominican Republic is plunged into the nightmare of a bloody and uncertain aftermath. Now, thirty years later, Urania reveals how her own family was fatally wounded by the forces of history. In The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa eloquently explores the effects of power and violence on the lives of both the oppressors and those they victimized.
The action of "The Time of the Hero," Nobel Prize-winning author
Mario Vargas Llosa's first novel, takes place at the Leoncio Prado
Military Academy in Lima, Peru. There, four angry cadets who have
formed an inner circle in an attempt to ward off the boredom and
stifling confinement of the military academy set off a chain of
events that starts with a theft and leads to murder and suicide.
"The Time of the Hero" presents, with great accuracy and power, the
cadets' nightmare life: brutal initiation rights, poker in the
latrines, drinking contests; and, above all else, the strange
military code which, whether broken or followed, can only
destroy.
"A "New York Times "Notable Book of 2007
In an isolated community in the Peruvian Andes, a series of mysterious disappearances has occurred. Army corporal Lituma and his deputy Tomas believe the Shining Path guerrillas are responsible, but the townspeople have their own ideas about the forces that claimed the bodies of the missing men. This riveting novel is filled with unforgettable characters, among them disenfranchised Indians, eccentric local folk, and a couple performing strange cannibalistic sacrifices. As the investigation progresses, Tomas entertains Lituma with the surreal tale of a precarious love affair. Death in the Andes is both a fascinating detective novel and an insightful political allegory. Mario Vargas Llosa offers a panoramic view of Peruvian society, from the recent social upheaval to the cultural influences in its past.
'The most approachable and exhilarating Latin American writer of our times.' Robert McCrum, Observer In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. From one of the world's great literary intelligences, Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation - an impassioned and essential critique of our time, with essays on the disappearance of eroticism, on culture politics and power, and the frivolity and banality of entertainment in Western culture.
When a high-profile businessman is blackmailed by a notorious magazine editor, his comfortable life is threatened by the salacious expose. While attempting to field the scandal, the businessman's wife, seeking comfort, begins a secret affair with the wife of his best friend. Then the editor is found murdered, and the two couples have no choice but to descend into the murkiest depths of Peruvian society, while the magazine's staff embarks on its greatest revelation yet . . .
'A modern tragedy on the grand scale.' Salman Rushdie The War of the End of the World is one of the great modern historical novels. Inspired by a real episode in Brazilian history, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story of an apocalyptic movement, led by a mysterious prophet, in which prostitutes, beggars and bandits establish Canudos, a new republic, a libertarian paradise.
"A "New York Times "Notable Book of 2007
A collection of Vargas Llosa's plays exploring the central theme of his work - how and why stories come into being and the relationship between fact and fiction. Vargas Llosa is the author of the novels Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and The War of the End of the World.
Set in Peru during the 1950s, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is the story of an 18 year old student who falls for a 32 year old divorcee. Mario, an aspiring writer, works at a radio station that broadcasts, live each day, up to a half-dozen short-run soap operas. At the same time that the author meets his "Aunt Julia", the radio station, which had been buying scripts by weight from Cuba, hires a Bolivian scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho to write the serials. The novel chronicles the scriptwriter's rise and fall in tandem with the protagonist's affair.
Mario Vargas Llosa's classic early novel takes place in a Peruvian town, situated between desert and jungle, which is torn by boredom and lust. Don Anselmo, a stranger in a black coat, builds a brothel on the outskirts of the town while he charms its innocent people, setting in motion a chain reaction with extraordinary consequences. This brothel, called the Green House, brings together the innocent and the corrupt: Bonificia, a young Indian girl saved by the nuns only to become a prostitute; Father Garcia, struggling for the church; and four best friends drawn to both excitement and escape. The conflicting forces that haunt the Green House evoke a world balanced between savagery and civilization -- and one that is cursed by not being able to discern between the two.
Conversation in the Cathedral takes place in 1950s Peru during the dictatorship of General Ordia. Suspicion, paranoia and blackmail have become part of life. The conversation flows between two individuals, Santiago and Ambrosia, who talk of their tormented lives and of the degradation and frustration that has taken over their town. In this groundbreaking novel, Mario Vargas Llosa explores the mental and moral mechanisms that govern power and the people behind it. It is about identity, the role of a citizen and how a lack of personal freedom can forever scar a nation and its people.
Published to coincide the with 50th anniversary of the Israel occupation of the West Bank, an anthology that explores the human cost of the conflict there as witnessed by such notable writers as Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, Dave Eggers, Madeleine Thien, Eimear McBride, Taiye Selasi and editors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. June 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Israel occupation of the West Bank. The violence on both sides of the conflict has been horrific, the casualties catastrophic. Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today's most renowned novelists and essayists, have joined forces with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence-an organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories and saw firsthand the injustice there-and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories. KINGDOM OF OLIVES AND ASH includes contributions from some of our most esteemed storytellers, including essays from editors Chabon and Waldman. Their writing enables readers to understand the human narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news. Together they all stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.
As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and his secret life as a gay man... Mario Vargas Llosa, with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative, takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo and Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor.
In Praise of the Stepmother is the story of Don Rigoberto, his second wife, Lucrecia, and his son, Alfonso. Their family life together seems to be a happy one. Rigoberto, an insurance company manager, spends his time preening himself for his wife and collecting erotic art. But while Lucrecia is devoted to him, she has her own needs, and soon finds herself the object of young Alfonso's attention. With meticulous observation and seductive skill, Mario Vargas Llosa explores the mysterious nature of happiness. Little by little, the harmony of his characters is darkened by the shadow of perversion. If you enjoyed In Praise of the Stepmother, you might also like Mario Vargas Llosa's The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto.
THE NEW NOVEL FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE "A wildly enjoyable book; the 85-year-old Vargas Llosa is as sharp and mordantly funny as ever." Financial Times Guatemala, 1954. A CIA-supported military coup topples the government. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changed the development of Latin America: that those in power encouraged the spread of Soviet communism in the Americas. Mario Vargas Llosa has written a drama on a world stage, in which some persecutors end up as victims of the very plot they helped construct. Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today.
In this delightful farce, the prim and proper Captain Pantoja is sent to Peru's Amazon frontier on a secret Army mission - he must find females for the amorous recruits. Yet complications arise as word of his achievements starts to spread, and he finds himself battling against his wife, religious zealots and the Army that gave him the mission in the first place. Through a wonderfully comic montage of letters, military documents, radio broadcasts, dream sequences and dialogue, Mario Vargas Llosa's Captain Pantoja and the Special Service combines political satire with humour, morality with uproarious sexuality.
This is a novel of guilt and innocence and the impossibility of justice in an unequal society. In Peru, an airman is found brutally murdered. Two policemen set out to investigate, but they are not glamorous detectives they do not even have a squad car and have to hitch rides on chicken trucks and cajole a cabdriver to take them to the scene of the crime. The author has written "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter", "The War at the End of the World", "The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta", "Captain Pantoja and the Special Service" and "The Perpetual Orgy". |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Surfacing - On Being Black And Feminist…
Desiree Lewis, Gabeba Baderoon
Paperback
R1,114
Discovery Miles 11 140
|