Sean M. Carroll
A First Time for Everything

Scientific theories about the origin of the universe often involve a vigorous give-and-take between speculation and discovery.

Chloë Clifton-Wright
‘Posterity Is Vulgar’

Encounters with a forgotten genius.

Ingrid D. Rowland
The Gentleman of Verona

The majesty, serenity, and opulence of Paolo Veronese’s paintings bolstered the myth of Venice’s vibrancy at a time of social, political, and religious decline.

Daphne Merkin
Elegy for the Shtetl

Chaim Grade became a writer in Lithuania but wrote his best novels in the Bronx after the Holocaust, recording in Yiddish the conflict between Jewish tradition and secular thinking that had characterized a whole world swept away.

Free from the Archives

In the Review’s May 26, 1994, issue, Alma Guillermoprieto wrote about the life and novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, who died this past April, aged eighty-nine. Guillermoprieto took up A Fish in the Water, his account of his coming of age, career, and, eventually, failed campaign for president of Peru—he lost to Alberto Fujimori—in 1990. “One is relieved to learn,” she wrote, “that his disastrous campaign was but one episode in a life generously filled with drama, and that a sense of proportion and irony provided by experience has allowed his ego a swift recovery.”

In the fall of 1990, months after Vargas Llosa lost the presidential election, Susannah Hunnewell and Ricardo Augusto Setti interviewed him for The Paris Review. They discussed Jorge Luis Borges, getting drunk on the most expensive cocktail in the world with Pablo Neruda, writing by longhand, weighing literature and politics, and much else besides.

Both the interview and Guillermoprieto’s essay about Vargas Llosa are available to read for free as part of a special offer with our friends at The Paris Review. If you enjoy the pairing, consider subscribing to both publications for only $119—37 percent off the regular price!

Alma Guillermoprieto
The Bitter Education of Vargas Llosa

“And yet, who but the novelist Vargas Llosa has done a better job of describing the mechanisms of power, despotism, and corruption as practiced in his native country?”

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