Three Plays

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Mario Vargas Llosa, the internationally acclaimed novelist and a cultural and political figure in Peru, explores the complexities of Peruvian society and the writer's imagination in three dramas.
In The Young Lady from Tacina, history and fiction collide in a 100-year-old woman known as Mamae, as her grand nephew attempts to turn the rich but contradictory stories of her life into a single narrative.
In Kathie and the Hippopotamus, a banker's wife recounts her travel adventures to a writer, but as he embellishes the tales with his own style and tastes, they transform into something altogether new and unexpected.
Finally, in La Chunga, the regulars in a small-town bar trade speculations about what happened between the bar's female owner, a local pimp, and their shared object of desire, who has disappeared.
Vargas Llorca introduces each play with a foreword that helps to place the action in context.

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He 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 also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.