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Mario Vargas Llosa

A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America’s most distinguished fiction writers and essayists. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including the novel The Bad Girl (FSG, 2007), from which “The Chilean Girls“ is excerpted.

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The Chilean Girls

Summer 2007 | Fiction

That was a fabulous summer. Pérez Prado and his twelve-professor orchestra came to liven up the Carnival dances at the Club Terrazas of Miraflores and the Lawn Tennis of Lima; a national mambo championship was organized in Plaza de Acho, which was a great success in spite of the threat by Cardinal Juan Gualberto Guevara, Archbishop of Lima, to excommunicate all the couples who took part; and my neighborhood, the Barrio Alegre of the Miraflores streets Diego Ferré, Juan Fanning, and Colón, competed in some Olympic games of mini-soccer, cycling, athletics, and swimming with the neighborhood of Calle San Martín, which, of course, we won.