NYT Books

Mr. Vargas Llosa, who ran for Peru’s presidency in 1990 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, transformed episodes from his personal life into books that reverberated far beyond the borders of his native country.

The Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was the world’s savviest and most accomplished political novelist.

He wrote extensively about the New York art scene in the 1960s and ’70s, then shifted to become a prominent street photographer.

Merle Oberon was a popular actress who was once nominated for an Oscar. But a fact that she hid from the public threatened to unspool her entire life’s work.

Her “Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself,” a guide to shedding toxic relationships, has sold more than seven million copies.

A real estate developer, he was instrumental in revitalizing the New York Public Library and transforming Bryant Park from a dangerous dead zone into a glorious sanctuary.

“Ceasefire,” his most famous poem, invoked the “Iliad” in exploring his country’s sectarian strife. But his work wasn’t Homeric in length: “Michael was a miniaturist.”

The book on which she collaborated with two fellow feminists drew global attention to the repression of women under their country’s dictatorship.

A fellow survivor, she was a literary and political adviser who helped her husband gain recognition as a singular moral authority on the Holocaust.

After fierce online bidding wars for vintage copies of “Entertaining,” a homemaking classic from 1982, the publisher decides to put it back in stores.