In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel Laureate maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and departure from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.Writers like Adam Smith, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin helped the author navigate through these uneasy years of intellectual formation. They showed him another school of thought that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class or party, and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal and philosophical ideology.Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's greatest living novelists, but, as Clive James wrote in Cultural Amnesia, his'true strength' is'undoubtedly in the essay'.

Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature'for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat.' He has also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor. His many works include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.John King (translator) is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa, and he has edited and translated several volumes of Vargas Llosa's essays, including Making Waves and Touchstones. He is professor of Latin American cultural history at the University of Warwick, England.