An English-language translation of the MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and LASA Premio Iberoamericano award-winning Spanish-language book, Arguedas/ Vargas Llosa. Dilemas y ensamblajes, Mabel Moraña offers the first comparative study of two of contemporary Latin America's central literary figures: Mario Vargas Llosa and Jose Maria Arguedas.

An English-language translation of the MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and LASA Premio Iberoamericano award-winning Spanish-language book, Arguedas/ Vargas Llosa. Dilemas y ensamblajes, Mabel Moraña offers the first comparative study of two of contemporary Latin America's central literary figures: Mario Vargas Llosa and Jose Maria Arguedas.

Fiction. In English translation. Jos Mara Arguedas is one of the few Latin American authors who loved and described his natural surroundings, and he ranks among the greatest writers of any time and place. He saw the beauty of the Peruvian landscape, as well as the grimness of social conditions in the Andes, through the eyes of the Indians who are a part of it. Ernesto, the narrator of Deep Rivers, is a child with origins in two worlds. The son of a wandering country lawyer, he is brought up by Indian servants until he enters a Catholic boarding school at age 14. In this urban Spanish environment he is a misfit and a loner. The conflict of the Indian and the Spanish cultures is acted out within him as it was in the life of Arguedas. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. While Arguedas poetry was published in Quechua, he invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary. This makes translation into other languages extremely difficult, and Frances Horning Barraclough has done a masterful job, winning the 1978 Translation Center Award from Columbia University.

Mario Vargas Llosa is a heterogeneous writer whose positions have often not been consistent from novel to novel, between his fictional and nonfictional work, between his literary and political commentary, and as his political commentary has proceeded over the decades. This analysis of his work reveals his insights into socio-political matters.

In A Story-Teller, Braulio Muñoz offers a critical appraisal of Mario Vargas Llosa's literary and political production from a sociotheoretical perspective. He engages the debate concerning the role of the writer in Latin America, the merits and shortcomings of modernist and postmodernist thought, and the differences between neoliberalism and alternative democractic positions.