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WellspringsStock informationGeneral Fields
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DescriptionWhen a master novelist, essayist, and critic searches for the wellsprings of his own work, where does he turn? Mario Vargas Llosa - Peruvian writer, presidential contender, and public intellectual - answers this most personal question with elegant concision in this collection of essays. In "Four Centuries of Don Quixote," he revisits the quintessential Spanish novel -a fiction about fiction whose ebullient prose still questions the certainties of our stumbling ideals. In recounting his illicit, delicious discovery of Borges' fiction - "the most important thing to happen to imaginative writing in the Spanish language in modern times" - Vargas Llosa stands in for a generation of Latin American novelists who were liberated from their sense of isolation and inferiority by this Argentinean master of the European tradition.In a nuanced appreciation of Ortega y Gasset, Vargas Llosa recovers the democratic liberalism of a misunderstood radical -a mid-century political philosopher on a par with Sartre and Russell, ignored because "he was only a Spaniard." Reviews[Vargas Llosa's] perceptions are detailed and astute.--Nedra Crowe-Evers"Library Journal" (05/13/2008) Author descriptionMario Vargas Llosa's many novels include The Feast of the Goat, The Storyteller, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and, most recently, The Bad Girl. In 2006 he presented the Richard A. Ellmann lectures at Emory University, entitled "Three Masters," which were adapted for this volume. |