People go to the movies in Vargas Llosa's The Cubs and Other Stories, but the book itself evokes other books rather than films. Not because it makes allusions or seems derivative, but because it aspires so transparently to literature, conjures up so clearly the decorous company of sensitive, intelligent, well-written texts it wishes to join. Vargas Llosa himself, in an engaging and modest preface written for this translation, says the book is derivative, attributes one story to the influence of Paul Bowles, and calls another "an out-of-tune echo of Malraux's novel Man's Hope." (p. 45)

The Cubs and Other Stories is an early work, a young man's book. The title piece, a novella, was written when Vargas Llosa was twenty-nine, but the other six stories were written when he was between seventeen and twenty-one. It is a young man's book in another sense. It is about youth; about the...