Letters to a Young Novelist

Letters to a Young Novelist

Cover of 1997 first edition
Author	Mario Vargas Llosa
Original title	Cartas a un joven novelista
Translator	Natasha Wimmer
Language	Spanish
Genre	Literary criticism (writing manual)
Publication date	1997
Pages	136

Letters to a Young Novelist (Spanish : Cartas a un joven novelista) is a non-fiction book by the Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, published in 1997. ^[1] An English translation by Natasha Wimmer was published in 2001. In 2011, the book was listed by The Guardian among the 100 best non-fiction books. ^[2]

Following in the footsteps of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet , Vargas Llosa in Letters to a Young Novelist discusses important tools and techniques of writing in eleven essays, in some cases using a classic text as an example, using letters as an organizational principle. ^[3] However, unlike in Rilke's book, the "young novelist" of the title is generally understood to be a conceit; there is no intended recipient other than the reader. ^[4]

Contents

The eleven essays (and postscript) of the book are titled as follows:

• The Parable of the Tapeworm
• The Catoblepas
• The Power of Persuasion
• Style
• The Narrator and Narrative Space
• Time
• Levels of Reality
• Shifts and Qualitative Leaps
• Chinese Boxes
• The Hidden Fact
• Communicating Vessels
• By Way of a P.S.

References

1. Barrós, Manuel (28 March 2017). "Libro de la semana: Cartas a un joven novelista de Mario Vargas Llosa". Casa de la Literatura Peruana (in Spanish).
2. "The 100 greatest non-fiction books". The Guardian . 14 June 2011.
3. "LETTERS TO A YOUNG NOVELIST". Kirkus Reviews . 15 April 2002.
4. Axelrod, Mark (Spring 2004). "Mario Vargas Llosa. Letters to a Young Novelist". The Review of Contemporary Fiction . 23 (1) – via Gale Literature Resource Center.

External links

• English text on Internet Archive