{"product_id":"mr-president-isbn-9780143136385","title":"Mr. President","description":"\u003cb\u003e“[A] brilliant translation . . . Electrifying vividness animates every page.” ―Claire Messud, \u003ci\u003eHarper’s Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A formidable new English translation.” ―\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] masterful translation.” ―\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNobel Prize–winning Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias’s masterpiece—the original Latin American dictator novel and pioneering work of magical realism—in its first new English translation in more than half a century, featuring a foreword by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlso available from Penguin Classics: Miguel Ángel Asturias’s visionary epic of ecological devastation, capitalist exploitation, and Indigenous wisdom, \u003ci\u003eMen of Maize\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn an unnamed country, an egomaniacal dictator schemes to dispose of a political adversary and maintain his grip on power. As tyranny takes hold, everyone is forced to choose between compromise and death. Inspired by life under the regime of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera of Guatemala, where it was banned for many years, and infused with exuberant lyricism, Mayan symbolism, and Guatemalan vernacular, Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias’s magnum opus is at once a surrealist masterpiece, a blade-sharp satire of totalitarianism, and a gripping portrait of psychological terror.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.“[A] brilliant translation . . . Shakespearean in scale . . . Electrifying vividness animates every page. . . . What makes \u003ci\u003eMr. President\u003c\/i\u003e extraordinary is not simply its enduring subject, but also its operatic and inventive multiform style . . . equally cinematic and poetic. It is reminiscent of Kafka and Beckett in its surreal flights within the consciousnesses of the mad or dying, or within the narrative of myth. . . . The novelʼs vision is relentlessly dark . . . but its execution is exhilarating, daring, even wild. Asturiasʼs boldness is repeatedly arresting, and his descriptions unforgettable. . . . [An] extraordinary and darkly prescient satire of life under brutal dictatorship.” ―\u003cb\u003eClaire Messud, \u003ci\u003eHarper’s Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] masterful translation . . . Reading \u003ci\u003eMr. President\u003c\/i\u003e, it’s impossible not to think about the current, sad situation in Guatemala, where endemic corruption, lawlessness, savage drug traffickers, heartless human smugglers, and staggering economic inequality . . . have driven hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans to attempt risky illegal entry into the United States. . . . But Asturias knew how to moderate those horrors by, thankfully, releasing the tension with absurd or scathingly mocking scenes.” ―\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A formidable new English translation [that] may return [Asturias] to the status that is his due. This time, the story speaks not only to Latin America’s cycles of tyranny but to a United States and a Europe confronting, for the first time since it was published, in 1946, a new wave of authoritarian leaders on the rise. . . . What makes \u003ci\u003eMr. President \u003c\/i\u003ea ‘tour de force of great originality,’ as the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa notes in a foreword to the new translation, is not its plot but its use of language, with invented words, songs, rhythms, and ‘astonishing metaphors.’ ” ―\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“One of the most important and influential works of modern Latin American literature, a kind of urtext for the celebrated generation of novelists that followed Asturias . . . Given its brilliance and influence, it continues to be a mystery why \u003ci\u003eMr. President \u003c\/i\u003eremains less known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired. . . . Even a cursory reading of David Unger’s new translation . . . establishes why it has had such an enormous impact. . . . Asturias . . . wrote especially beautiful descriptions of both rural landscapes and the sounds and smells of urban life. Unger reproduces these passages magnificently. . . . Set pieces . . . are so vivid that they almost seem to have come from a movie projector. . . . Thanks to Unger’s translation, the anglophone reader can finally be let in on the secret that Latin Americans . . . have always known: \u003ci\u003eMr. President \u003c\/i\u003eis a canonical work, doomed to remain timely and topical until the conditions that generated it finally disappear.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brings to life a nameless hell on earth where freedom is only possible through exile or death.” ―\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[With this] masterful, clear new translation . . . a new generation of North American readers will gain access to [Asturias’s] witty, influential, and wrongly maligned masterpiece. . . . The praise for Unger’s translation is highly deserved. But the fact of Penguin Classics and Unger choosing this unfairly suppressed book is long overdue, the wait like being unburied, with your eyes open.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublic Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A nightmarish marvel of the picaresque, a chronicle of unrelenting depravity that often feigns a slip into the fantastic before you remember that all of it is essentially true . . . Anyone who reads one of Asturias’s great novels may gasp, as I did, at the prowess of this minor American giant and wonder about the causes of his relative obscurity.” —\u003cb\u003eParker Hatley, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] harrowing masterwork [of] staggering, lasting beauty . . . A vehicle for lyrical depiction of a people under psychological siege . . . Elegant . . . Brilliant.” ―\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmericas Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eMr. President \u003c\/i\u003e. . . deserves a place in the canon of not just Latin American, but world literature. . . . This is a novel that, as much as it is a classic, . . . remains relevant now in the twenty-first century. . . . This new translation [is] executed magnificently by fellow Guatemalan David Unger. . . . Unger has done the English-speaking world a service. . . . The reader is gifted a flame to behold [the novel’s] sometimes horrendous (and sometimes gorgeous) scenes that would otherwise remain in the dark.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAmerican Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A faithful rendering of a timeless classic, a bold translation that at times leans heavily on the original text’s musicality, while at the same time adding a contemporary take and fresh idiomatic ideas to a profoundly idiosyncratic novel. Unger was also able to masterfully bring Asturias’s lyrical beauty into English and even adapt much of \u003ci\u003eEl señor presidente\u003c\/i\u003e’s brutality, absurdity, and humor.” ―\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAsymptote\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An astonishing nightmare vision of life in a country ruled with unwavering brutality . . . The novel is a linguistic \u003ci\u003etour de force\u003c\/i\u003e. . . . In a just world, David Unger’s new translation . . . will finally afford this groundbreaking novel the recognition it deserves among English-language readers. . . . Unger’s translation . . . maintains the source text’s poetic, incantatory language . . . and also captures . . . the razzle-dazzle of Asturias’s prose. . . . Unger’s deft touch . . . preserves the beauty and inventiveness of Asturias’s style, recreating this author’s alliterations, rhymes, onomatopoeias, and amazing metaphors. . . . Unger has captured the beauty, creativity, and innovation found in this fun-house-mirror nightmare of a world. Bravo.” —\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTranslation Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A great novel . . . A work of art, a true tour de force of originality and creativity . . . The opening chapters . . . are unforgettable. . . . Half a century after it was written, \u003ci\u003eMr. President\u003c\/i\u003e continues to be one of the most original Latin American texts. . . . [It] raised the Latin American novel to its highest level.” —\u003cb\u003eMario Vargas Llosa, from the Foreword\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The single most famous dictator novel in Latin American history [and] the first major novel in Latin America to attempt a revolution in literary language. . . . I was stunned when I first read it at the age of nineteen, three months after I had read Joyce’s \u003ci\u003eUlysses\u003c\/i\u003e. . . . Without Asturias, the so-called ‘magical realist’ perspective and techniques of \u003ci\u003eOne Hundred Years of Solitude\u003c\/i\u003e might not have existed. It was not Gabriel García Márquez who invented magical realism; it was Miguel Ángel Asturias.” ―\u003cb\u003eGerald Martin, from the Introduction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“What I find most compelling about \u003ci\u003eMr. President\u003c\/i\u003e is how much it speaks to the here and now. We live in an age of demagogues. We’ve seen how the whims and fears of a leader, transformed into deeds by an army of sycophants, can spread chaos through a nation’s institutions. Asturias saw this madness, too, and created art from it. . . . In \u003ci\u003eMr. President\u003c\/i\u003e, Asturias . . . exposes the lies of a strongman and . . . make[s] us feel how one man can inflict a daily assault on the collective psyche of a people.” —\u003cb\u003eHéctor Tobar, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A truly magical work . . . [It] captures brilliantly . . . the interior climate of a small Latin American republic under a repressive dictatorship. . . . The portrait of \u003ci\u003eEl Señor Presidente\u003c\/i\u003e is chillingly drawn. . . . It is the kind of performance that strains at the limits of a novelist’s craft and is seldom repeated in a writer’s career except by genius.” —\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMiguel Ángel Asturias\u003c\/b\u003e (1899-1974) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967. A poet, diplomat, and novelist from Guatemala, he studied law in his home country before continuing his studies in Paris, where he encountered the surrealist writings that would deeply influence his work. In addition to being a prolific writer, he worked as a newspaper correspondent in western Europe and later as an ambassador for Guatemala in Europe and Latin America. He wrote numerous works of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays, including the novels \u003ci\u003eMr. President \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eMen of Maize.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDavid Unger\u003c\/b\u003e (translator) has received Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He is the author of several novels, including \u003ci\u003eThe Mastermind, The Price of Escape,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eLife in the Damn Tropics\u003c\/i\u003e, and has translated more than a dozen books from Spanish into English. His short stories and essays have been published in \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e Guernica\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eBomb.\u003c\/i\u003e Born in Guatemala, Unger now lives in Brooklyn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMario Vargas Llosa\u003c\/b\u003e (1936–2025; foreword) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He also won the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor, the Cervantes Prize, as well as the Jerusalem Prize and many other literary awards. His many novels include \u003ci\u003eThe Feast of the Goat\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAunt Julia and the Scriptwriter\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe War of the End of the World\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Bad Girl\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eConversation in the Cathedral, \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Harsh Times.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eGerald Martin\u003c\/b\u003e (introduction) is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh. Among his publications are \u003ci\u003eGabriel García Márquez: A Life\u003c\/i\u003e and a translation and critical edition of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s \u003ci\u003eMen of Maize.\u003c\/i\u003e Martin lives in England.","brand":"Penguin Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302085054693,"sku":"NP9780143136385","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143136385.jpg?v=1767733052","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/mr-president-isbn-9780143136385","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}