Friday, October 8, 2010

Guy who punched future Nobel winner in literature wins Nobel in literature

Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face in 1976, won the Nobel in Literature on Thursday.

Garcia Marquez, author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera," won the prize in 1982.

If you feel like stalking him, Vargas Llosa is in New York, teaching how to punch writers or something. One of my favorite Vargas Llosa tales is "The Cubs," a short story not about the baseball team, but about a boy who suffers accidental castration at a Marist school in Peru, which is great advertising for a high school.

Full disclosure: I attended that very school, but my favorite Vargas Llosa novel is "La Ciudad y los Perros," which doesn't translate into "The Time of the Hero," but that's the English title anyway.

He also held a seminar at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson in 2006, the one you didn't go to because you didn't know who he was.

Now he's going to punch you in the face.