In awarding the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa in October, the Swedish Academy cited the Peruvian novelist’s “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” The Common Review approached four critics and scholars and asked each to offer brief reflections on his or her favorite Vargas Llosa book.

Dubravka Ugrešić is the most prominent writer to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in recent times. Though she has written movingly, in novels and essays, about the wars that ripped apart that country and the painful healing processes that have been in place since the end of the conflicts, it would be a mistake to see Ugrešić as a writer defined only by bloodbath in the Balkans.

In the memorable words of those other ‘60s hangovers, the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” There have been few stranger trips than the intellectual odyssey undertaken by some of the Dead’s contemporaries, as chronicled by Richard Wolin in The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s.

Gianni Vattimo’s book-length essay, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, first published in 2000 in Italian, is a kind of apologia for a philosophical life that has always been, to say the least, exposed to controversy. Vattimo’s youthful Catholicism was shattered by an early encounter with Friedrich Nietzsche, and the prospect of a “transvaluation of values” in the wake of the “death of God” turned him into a passionate campaigner against the Catholic hierarchy and the entire bourgeois social order. In 1968 (as he recalls in a brief but luminous autobiography, Not Being God, published in English in 2009) he felt himself morphing from romantic anticapitalist into revolutionary Maoist,...

Fran Hawthorne opens The Overloaded Liberal with a concise definition of the emergence of what I’d call pocketbook activism: “harnessing everyday life to change something bigger in the world.” She contrasts this with the traditional activism of picketers, marchers, and other protesters, who use “extraordinary measures to change some aspect of everyday life.”