The City and the Dogs

Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) is a Peruvian writer, one of the outstanding representatives of Latin American prose, Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2010, recipient of the Cervantes Prize and other prestigious awards, member of the French Academy, and a knight of the Legion of Honor. "The City and the Dogs," the first and largely autobiographical novel of Mario Vargas Llosa, is among the top twenty Spanish-language novels of the 20th century, and it is widely believed that the "boom" of Latin American prose began with it. However, the fate of the novel was complicated in the writer's homeland. In 1962, it was awarded the prestigious Spanish Breve Library Prize, and that same year, the leadership of the military academy described in the book denounced the novel as defamatory and organized a public burning ceremony of 1000 copies in the schoolyard. The novel's heroes are sixteen-year-old cadets of the prestigious Leoncio Prado Military Academy. Parents send their wayward children here in the hope that the strict barrack discipline will knock the foolishness out of them and help them grow into decent people…