The Time of the Hero

From the author of the novel “War of the End of the World.”

Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the most outstanding representatives of Latin American prose.

It is believed that it was “The City and the Dogs” that started a true “upsurge” in Latin American literature.

Mario Vargas Llosa (born 1936) is a Peruvian writer, one of the leading representatives of Latin American prose, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Cervantes Prize, and other prestigious awards, a member of the French Academy, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour.

“The City and the Dogs,” Llosa’s first novel and in many ways autobiographical, is included among the top twenty Spanish-language novels of the 20th century, and— as it is commonly thought—the “boom” of Latin American prose began with it. However, the novel’s fate in the writer’s homeland was not easy. In 1962, it won a prestigious Spanish Library Breve Prize, and the same year, the leadership of the military academy described in the book condemned the novel as slanderous and held a public ceremony burning 1000 copies on the school yard.

The novel’s heroes are sixteen-year-old cadets of the prestigious Leoncio Prado Military Academy. Their parents send their troublesome children there in the hope that strict barracks discipline will knock the foolishness out of them and help them grow into decent people…