Mario Vargas Llosa

El rol del escritor en nuestro brave new world.

Year One

A chance to say thank you.

Heroes

The older I grow, the more respect I lose for people I once admired, particularly artists. We seek guidance when we’re young, but as we age our values become more cemented. We forge our own unique selves through experience, and what is important remains with us, while the unimportant

The Zero-State Solution

Politics of wasteland.

Flaubert’s Horses

Imagination comes from the Latin word imago (image): the greatest writers make of scribbles on the page the projection of a living dream. Literature is an artificial dream, a flow of images flying before our minds, deconstructed after writing, reconstructed uniquely by a reader’s own lived experience. The finest

El Milagro Secreto

El arte y el olvido

Virtual library

Here it is, my friends, our virtual library! Over the past two weeks you’ve answered my call to build a virtual library, and the result is quite the fascinating and eclectic collection. There’s a summer read in here for everyone. I loved our project. I’m thinking we

The glassy, burning floor of hell

Hoy

“Hoy es el día más hermoso de nuestra vida, querido Sancho. Los obstáculos más grandes, nuestras propias indecisiones, nuestro enemigo más fuerte, el miedo al poderoso y a nosotros mismos. La cosa más fácil, equivocarnos. La más destructiva, la mentira y el egoísmo. La peor derrota, el desaliento. Los defectos

The spirit is a stomach

I can’t recall if it’s either in Zarathustra or Beyond Good And Evil where Nietzsche writes that the spirit is a stomach. It’s so true, and we really are what we eat. These days algorithms are our dieticians, telling us what to read, listen, and experience. Social

Fade to Black

Heavy metal as a force of civilization.

The Rains of Greenland