This delightful farce opens as the prim and proper Captain Pantoja learns he is to be sent to Peru's Amazon frontier on a secret mission for the army—to provide females for the amorous recruits. Side-splitting complications arise as world of Captain Pantoja's remarkable achievements start to spread.

This delightful farce opens as the prim and proper Captain Pantoja learns he is to be sent to Peru's Amazon frontier on a secret mission for the army--to provide females for the amorous recruits. Side-splitting complications arise as world of Captain Pantoja's remarkable achievements start to spread.

This delightful farce opens as the prim and proper Captain Pantoja learns he is to be sent to Peru's Amazon frontier on a secret mission for the army—to provide females for the amorous recruits. Side-splitting complications arise as world of Captain Pantoja's remarkable achievements start to spread.

Originally published in hardcover in 1998.

This collection of essays associated with Mario Vargas Llosa’s visits to the City College of New York offers readers an opportunity to learn about his body of work through his own perspective and those of key fiction writers and literary critics.

Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant, multilayered novel is set in the Lima, Peru, of the author's youth, where a young student named Marito is toiling away in the news department of a local radio station. His young life is disrupted by two arrivals. The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane. Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is hilarious, mischievous, and masterful, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

A tabloid sex scandal leads to murder in the Nobel laureate’s politically charged thriller set among the wealthy elite of 1990s Peru. Through the 1990s, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori oversaw a deeply corrupt society. Those among the elite enjoyed privilege beyond imagining. But two couples from Lima’s upper class are about to become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail. Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from notorious tabloid editor Rolando Garro, who attempts to blackmail him with graphic pictures from an old business trip. When Enrique refuses to pay, the images are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique’s wife is in the midst of a passionate affair with the wife of Enrique’s lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples must navigate the unspoken laws and customs of Peru’s criminal underworld, while the magazine staff embarks on its greatest exposé yet. A twisting, unpredictable tale, The Neighborhood is at once a scathing indictment of Fujimori’s regime and a crime thriller that evokes the vulgarity of freedom in a corrupt system.