The Peruvian Nobel laureate presents a collection of essays on the decline of intellectual life in the age of media spectacle.

In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation -- penned by Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics.

Taking his cues from T.S. Eliot -- whose essay "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture" is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished -- Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate.

But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

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