Harsh Times

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ＂for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.＂ He has also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Adrian Nathan West is a novelist, an essayist, and a translator based in Spain. His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and the novel My Father’s Diet.