Authors: Mario Vargas Llosa, Natasha Wimmer
ISBN-13: 9780312421724, ISBN-10: 0312421729
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: April 2003
Edition: First Picador Edition
Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, and The Feast of the Goat. He lives in London.
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, Céline, Cortázar, 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.
[Llosa's] ambition worthy of . . . masters . . . with a technical skill that brings him closer to the heirs of Flaubert and Henry James.
The Parable of the Tapeworm | 3 | |
The Catoblepas | 15 | |
The Power of Persuasion | 25 | |
Style | 31 | |
The Narrator and Narrative Space | 41 | |
Time | 59 | |
Levels of Reality | 73 | |
Shifts and Qualitative Leaps | 89 | |
Chinese Boxes | 101 | |
The Hidden Fact | 109 | |
Communicating Vessels | 121 | |
By Way of a P.S. | 131 | |
Index of Names and Works | 133 |