With his ferocious radicalism and bridge-burning experimentalism, Peruvian César Vallejo played avant-garde to the avant-garde. This wonderful selection of his poems, letters, essays, plats, and journalistic writings, with erudite and thoughtful commentary by Joseph Mulligan, gives us a brilliant and inviting open door to access the inner workings of the convulsive, dark, agonistic, and magically creative mind of one of the most radical innovators of twentieth-century literature. This book will change the rules of the Vallejo game forever.--Gustavo Faverón Patriau. For the first time in English, readers can now evaluate the extraordinary breadth of César Vallejo's diverse oeuvre that, in addition to poetry, includes magazine and newspaper articles, chronicles, political reports, fictions, plays, letters, and notebooks. Edited by the translator Joseph Mulligan, Selected Writings follows Vallejo down his many winding roads, from Santiago de Chuco in highland Peru, to the coastal cities of Trujillo and Lima, on to Paris, Madrid, Moscow, and Leningrad.    Informed by a vast body of scholarly research, this compendium synthesizes a restored literary corpus and, in bold translations that embrace the idiosyncratic spirit of the author's writing, puts forth a new representation of this essential figure of twentieth-century Latin American literature as an indispensable alternative to the European avant-garde. Compiling well known versions with over eighty percent of the text presented in English translation for the first time, Selected Writings is both a trove of and tribute to Vallejo's multifaceted work.   “This generous volume of Selected Writings a helps us to fill the gaps and get a fuller sense of Vallejo as an author and actor on the intellectual stage.” - Times Literary Supplement