One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposés. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique’s wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique’s lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru’s unspoken laws and customs, while the staff of the magazine embark on their greatest exposé yet.
Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, the novel swirls into the kind of restless realism that has become Mario Vargas Llosa’s signature style. 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.

An exemplary novel in the history of the boom in Latin American literature, La casa verde is a must for every reader who wants an in-depth knowledge of the narrative work of Mario Vargas Llosa. The novel takes place in two very distant points: Piura, in the desert of coastal Peru, and Santa Maria de Nieva, a factory/mission compound lost in the heart of the Amazonia. The symbol that locks the mystery of this story is the mythical pleasure house that Don Anselmo, the foreigner, erects in the outskirts of Piura. Description in Spanish: La casa verde transcurre en dos lugares muy alejados entre si: Piura, en el desierto del litoral peruano, y Santa Maria de Nieva, una factoria y mision religiosa perdida en el corazon de la Amazonia. Simbolo de la historia es la mitica casa de placer que don Anselmo, el forastero, erige en las afueras de Piura. Novela ejemplar en la historia del boom latinoamericano, La casa verde es una experiencia ineludible para todo aquel que quiera conocer en profundidad la obra narrativa de Mario Vargas Llosa.

Translated to over 30 languages, this is perhaps Vargas Llosa s most violent book. Set in a military school in Lima, where an unwritten code of survival of the fittest is imposed. Here, he focuses on the brutality of military life and the strong pyramidal hierarchy that mirrors Peruvian society, where violence, exploitation and human degradation guarantee that each layer of the social pyramid maintains its place. All the conflicts of Peruvian society arise with rage and impotence in this testimonial novel in which Vargas Llosa paints a social and political picture.

Mario Vargas Llosa condenses a lifetime of writing, reading, and thought into an essential manual for aspiring writers. Drawing on the stories and novels of writers from around the globe--Borges, Bierce, Celine, Cortazar, Faulkner, Kafka, Robbe-Grillet--he lays bare the inner workings of fiction, all the while urging young novelists not to lose touch with the elemental urge to create. Conversational, eloquent, and effortlessly erudite, this little book is destined to be read and re-read by young writers, old writers, would-be writers, and all those with a stake in the world of letters.