"Mario Vargas Llosa, renowned as a novelist, is one of our most brilliant and provocative public intellectuals as well. In Making Waves, the first collection of his essays, he explores, with characteristic brio and elegance, his long-standing preoccupations - literature and politics, Europe and the Americas, and the relations among them all." "We follow Vargas Llosa from his native Peru to Madrid and then to Paris, the setting of essays on his great precursors Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, as well as a comic account of his visit to the tomb of Rin Tin Tin and an affecting memoir of his time in the city as an aspiring writer in the 1960s. In passionately critical essays on the Cuban revolution and its aftermath, Vargas Llosa takes up vital questions of Latin American independence, while in essays on Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar - and in an exchange with Gunter Grass - he ponders magic realism. In more recent articles, he considers the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path and the presidency of Alberto Fujimori - and the failures of the English public-school system, which made his son into a Rastafarian." "The essays in Making Waves are full of Mario Vargas Llosa's unflagging literary intensity and moral and political integrity. They are an important addition to the body of work of this major international writer."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Country of a Thousand Faces When Madrid was a Village Chronicle of the Cuban Revolution In a Normandy Village, Remembering Paul Escobar Toby, Rest in Peace P'tit Pierre Hemingway: The Shared Feast A Visit to Bunuel Luis Bunuel: A Festival of Excellent Bad Films Simone de Beauvoir: Les Belles Images Sebastian Salazar Bondy and the Vocation of the Writer in Peru Literature is Fire Literature and Exile Socialism and the Tanks A Visit to Karl Marx Joyce's Dubliners The Other Oscar Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook Letter to Haydee Santamaria Albert Camus and the Morality of Limits Bataille or the Redemption of Evil Sartre, Fierabras and Utopia The Mandarin

Isaiah Berlin: A Hero of Our Time Faulkner in Laberinto William Faulkner: The Sanctuary of Evil John Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer The World Cup, Spain 1982 The Story of a Massacre Freedom for the Free? Nicaragua at the Crossroads My Son the Rastafarian The Trumpet of Deya Botero: A Sumptuous Abundance Szyszlo in the Labyrinth Degenerate Art A Fleeting Impression of Vaclav Havel Swiss Passion Letter to Salman Rushdie The 'People' and the 'Decent People': On Contemporary Peru The Death of Che Nations, Fictions Saul Bellow and Chinese Whispers Visual Contact The Penis or Life: The Bobbitt Affair The Truth of Lies.