This book provides the first look at the dynamic resurgence of Peruvian narrative since the late 1990s.
Talk-show host Jaime Bayly's seven novels have scandalized Lima's society with their treatment of homosexuality and have attracted record sales throughout the Spanish-speaking world with their exciting re-creation of Lima slang and focus on McOndo themes such as marginality, drugs and sexuality. University lecturer Iván Thays has vigorously opposed this light narrative with a 'high' cultural alternative. Madrid-based Jorge Eduardo Benavides' narrative has offered an aesthetically challenging and explicitly politicized alternative to both Bayly's increasingly mass-marketed, global books and Thays' individualized, elitist novels. Benavides' marrying of aesthetics and politics stands in importance alongside Mario Vargas Llosa and José María Arguedas in terms of the mediation between culture and politics in Peru since the 1930s.