The Campaign of Gettysburg (1912)

One of Latin America’s most garlanded novelists–and winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature–Mario Vargas Llosa is also an acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and acerbic political commentator. Touchstones collects Vargas Llosa’s brilliant readings of landmark twentieth-century novels–from Heart of Darkness to The Tin Drum –as well as incisive essays on political and social thinkers and contemporary pieces on 9/11 and the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq.