Mario Vargas Llosa

The Feast of the Goat (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

In Mario Vargas Llosa's brilliant novel about the Trujillo regime, the Dominican Republic stands for all tyrannized nations and the 1960's stand for any period of political domination and unrest. In this conversation, we explore the use of fact in novel-writing, in particular the facts of South American dictatorships' uses of torture and coercion. In his quest for the dark "true memory" of violation, Vargas Llosa rejects the myth-making of a Garcia Marquez. Read an

excerpt from

The Feast of the Goat

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