{"product_id":"9780374175757","title":"In Praise of Reading and Fiction : The Nobel Lecture","description":"\u003cstrong\u003eIn Praise of Reading and Fiction\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor(s): Mario Vargas Llosa\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn December 7, 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Nobel lLecture 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReview(s):\u003cbr\u003e“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.” —\u003ci\u003eAlan Cheuse, San Francisco Chronicle on Mario Vargas Llosa\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eISBN:  9780374175757\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ","brand":"Farrar, Straus and Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":40593732829390,"sku":"9780374175757","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0600\/7029\/7806\/products\/getimage_3eb69f1e-8f39-4087-8775-5382eab702ce.jpg?v=1637792458","url":"https:\/\/pickwickbookshop.com\/products\/9780374175757","provider":"Pickwick Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}