In Praise of Reading and Fiction
The Nobel Lecture
ISBN10: 0374175756
ISBN13: 9780374175757
Hardcover
48 Pages
$16.00
CA$18.50
On December 7, 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Nobel Lecture is a resounding tribute to fiction's power to inspire readers to greater ambition, to dissent, and to political action. "We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist," Vargas Llosa writes. "Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute—the foundation of the human condition—and should be better." Vargas Llosa's lecture is a powerful argument for the necessity of literature in our lives today. For, as he eloquently writes, "literature not only submerges us in the dream of beauty and happiness but alerts us to every kind of oppression."
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Praise for In Praise of Reading and Fiction
Praise for Mario Vargas Llosa:
"The bold, dynamic and endlessly productive imagination of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the writing giants of our time, is something truly to be admired . . . As with any great writer, [he] makes us see clearly what we have been looking at all the while but never noticed."—Alan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle
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BOOK EXCERPTS
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IN PRAISE OF READING AND FICTION (Begin Reading)
I LEARNED TO READ AT THE AGE OF FIVE, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy...
About the author
Mario Vargas Llosa; Translated by Edith Grossman
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