Letters to a Young Novelist

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 byThe Guardian among the 100 best non-fiction books.^[2]

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

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.