Remembering Mario Vargas Llosa

April 14

What best distinguished Mario Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima on April 13, 2025, was the voraciousness of his intellect and the elasticity of his literary talent. He was an advocate for the free-flow of ideas and a meticulous portraitist of what makes Latin America a fascinatingly complex landscape. 

I admired Vargas Llosa’s stamina, his unpredictability, his perseverance. Suspicious of ideological orthodoxies, he ran for president of Peru in 1990—and lost soundly. Twenty years later, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The legacy he leaves behind is monumental: literature, he believed, must be far more than entertainment: it is sheer inquiry. As such, it must be defined by skepticism, by refusing to take anything for granted. 

His novels, from Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) to The Feast of the Goat (2000), offer a nuanced portrait of just about every layer of society. Imbued by the influence of Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo, they are written with a nineteenth-century flair for realism and a hope for totality, juxtaposing a multiplicity of voices in an effort to see truth in the sum of its parts.  

The last surviving member of the generation known as the Latin American Boom that included Julio Cortázar from Argentina, Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, Carlos Fuentes from Mexico, José Donoso from Chile, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante from Cuba, Vargas Llosa was also a superb essayist. His fortnightly opinion column “Touchstone” (“Piedra de Toque”) for the Madrid-based newspaper El País was a lucid example of rigor and daring. Its style was as hypnotizing as it was thought-provoking. 

As Vargas Llosa’s career developed, so did his politics. He began as a fervent leftist and evolved into a supporter of neoliberal ideals. That odyssey maps the syncopated sides in the Spanish-speaking world. The swing of the pendulum is the true engine for progress.

—Ilan Stavans 

On This Day, in This Year, Reading is an Act of Resistance

January 20

Queridos Amigos,

Sometimes at night, when insomnia visits me, I imagine a country made up entirely of immigrants—every single one of its citizens. Would such a place be at a disadvantage vis-a-vis more typical states? Certainly not for any lack of roots, since immigrants, just like everyone else, have roots in abundance. And we have something else: “the immigrant ethos,” pushing forward all the time and at any cost, for ourselves and for others. I don’t think this dream of mine is dystopian. On the contrary, I would happily pledge allegiance to such a nation: after all, it would always feel new.

More than 14 percent of Americans are immigrants—a whopping 27 percent if you count their children who were born here. That’s over 90 million people, enough to make its own large country. (As an example, France today has a population of 66 million.) Of course, the issue of immigration is not new, neither here nor anywhere else. Odysseus is an immigrant, at least until his journey back to Ithaca is complete. The Bible is full of immigrants (Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham…). So were the songs of medieval troubadours. If the word “immigrant” doesn’t convince you as a referent in all these cases, just call them outsiders.

The United States has, from day one, questioned what it means to be an outsider, and how newcomers reinvent us as a nation. That’s also a global conversation. People from Egypt, Pakistan, and India constitute more than 80% of the population of the United Arab Emirates. Half a million Haitians have sought a better life in the Dominican Republic. The same can be said of Turkish citizens moving to Germany, Palestinians to Chile, Chinese and Vietnamese to South Korea, and people from Benin, Ghana, Niger, and Togo to Nigeria. For whatever the reason—financial, political, climatic—venturing from one’s place of birth to a safer haven is the defining force shaping the 21st century.

At Restless Books, empathizing with the outsider is our mission. In our increasingly polarized world—ruled by suspicion of the other, and shaped by the dangerous belief that immigrants seeking a better life pose a threat to citizens seeking the same—we remain committed to delivering superb stories from around the globe about people and ideas in motion.

Our books are often by and about immigrants. Their disparate stories open us up to unexpected discoveries about who we are. They illustrate that the movement of people from one place to another isn’t a threat but an affirmation of shared humanity. For these books to reach our shelves, they depend on another heroic figure: the translator. Without translators, language would divide our world rather than unite it. (Independent publishers like Restless are increasingly the best purveyors of literature in translation—take a look at World Literature Today’s list of 75 notable translations of 2024.) 

This year, I invite you to read books by immigrants, about immigrants, and books from countries other than your own. I am proud to say that 8 of the 11 books we will publish in 2025 are written by immigrant writers. Here is a sampling: 

Lamentations of Nezahualcóyotl, a collection of Nahuatl poems by the most transformative thinker of the pre-Hispanic past in Mexico, inaugurates our new line of poetry books. 

What This Place Makes me: Contemporary Plays On Immigration brings together seven prize-winning American immigrant playwrights whose work looks at the capacity of outsiders to redefine us.

Linda Bondestam’s Good Morning, Space tells an illustrated story of a spirited young child who discovers space creatures waking up on the other end of a makeshift telescope at 4:00 a.m.

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s cult classic The Village Beyond the Mist, which famously inspired the film Spirited Away, will now be published for the first time in English on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

Camille U. Adams’s How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir brings an astounding new voice and style to the genre, one that will redefine the Caribbean literary canon.

In addition to our publishing program, thanks to our ongoing collaboration with the New York Public Library and the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, we will continue our immigrant writing workshops to offer tools to emerging immigrant writers to tell their stories.

I also have the pleasure to announce that, in the spirit of debunking what used to be strict boundaries between literary genres, our prestigious Prize for New Immigrant Writing, awarding $10,000 and a residency at Millay Arts, will no longer separate submissions into fiction and nonfiction categories. In this 10th year of the prize, we will now accept both genres each year. The prize has proudly launched the careers of essential voices such as Grace Talusan, Deepak Unnikrishnan, Rajiv Mohabir, Priyanka Champaneri, Ani Gjika, and others. We look forward to the next generation of immigrant writers who will define our age through their unique insights.

I invite you to open these and other books and travel to unforeseen places. Yes, I invite you to do something humans depend on more than ever: the intimate art of reading. May the new year make us less suspicious of one another. Reading is the antidote. In the act and art of reading, we all become immigrants.

Gracias,

Ilan Stavans

Publisher

Announcing the Winner of the 2024 Prize for New Immigrant Writing: Sofi Stambo!

We are thrilled to share the announcement published in Literary Hub that this year’s Prize for New Immigrant Writing in fiction goes to Sofi Stambo for her collection of short stories titled A Bunch of Savages! It will be published in Spring 2026. The characters in the collection have come from all over the world to New York City, where they dance and laugh their way out of difficult situations and into even messier ones, struggling to play parts that fate seems to assign them at random. They run in and out of diners, offices, and painter’s workshops, gesticulating to explain themselves, never knowing the right words, or if they do, voicing them in a way only other immigrants can understand. Their nostalgia transforms the big city into their little Italy or little Odessa or little Sofia. With pathos and humor, scenes from the narrator’s former life in Bulgaria weave into the mix like dreams.

This year’s prize was judged by authors Rivka Galchen, Priyanka Champaneri, and Ilan Stavans, who have this to say about Sofi’s work:

“Sofi Stambo’s wondrous, unpredictable and extraordinarily perceptive humor lights up these pages, and occasionally even sets them on fire. A Bunch of Savages is a superb investigation into the contrary, bemusing, feral and fearsome facets of our shared human character.”

—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“Sofi Stambo’s prose is effervescent and her humor razor sharp, but it’s her empathy that won my heart. From Bulgarian beaches to city diners, these slice-of-life stories follow characters both heady with hope and noble in defeat, shaping a collection that’s ultimately an ode to the strange wonder of being alive.”

—Priyanka Champaneri, author of The City of Good Death

“In our dark age in which outsiders are easily—and lazily—satanized, Sofi Stambo offers an essential antidote: humanization. There is an ecumenical quality to her perspective. Her characters, no matter where they come from, are quirky, complex, emblematic, and, more than anything else, unique. A Bunch of Savages lusciously pushes immigrant literature to new heights.”

—Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books and author of Sabor Judio: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook

Sofi tells us, “I immigrated to the US twenty-seven years ago. Living in New York, I had to learn to hear, think, and write in English rather than my native Bulgarian or equally strong Russian. To think exclusively in English, to dream in it as proof of fluency has been a challenge. The way people struggle to express themselves because of cultural, educational, and language barriers is what interests me most as a writer.”

Sofi Stambo’s stories have been published by Promethean, Ep;phany, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, New England Review, Stand, American Short Fiction, Guernica, AGNI, Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta Bulgaria, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Rumpus. She was awarded the 2024 LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction, won the first prize in fiction in the 2015 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International literary contest, was selected by WIGLEAF for their 2016 best flash top list, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018. Her novel All In is a finalist for the LANDO award from The de Groot Foundation 2023. Stambo has a master’s degree in Literature from Sofia University St. K. Ohridski, Bulgaria.

You can read an excerpt from A Bunch of Savages in The Common. Congratulations, Sofi!