Mario Vargas Llosa

The Time of the Hero (1963), the first novel by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, was set in a Peruvian military academy that the author had attended. Authorities at the academy burned hundreds of copies of his book in protest. “If Vargas Llosa tells us much less about the lure of dictators than the other novelists,” wrote critic Michael Wood, “he tells us far more about the details of day-­to-­day intrigue, and the sordid, sadistic minutiae of torture and murder.” He is the author of more than twenty novels, including The Storyteller (1989), The Feast of the Goat (2001), and Five Corners (2016).