@ Busboys and Poets 5th & K: Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Reputations
Vásquez won the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Sound of Things Falling, a work of devastating realism that looked at ordinary lives in the pressure cooker of political repression and cartel violence. In his new novel the Colombian writer examines the nexus of public and private, following the life of Javier Mallarino, a political cartoonist of uncommon power whose work has overturned laws, ended careers, and exposed fraud and manipulation. After forty years, he’s ready to rest on his laurels—but a woman with ties to his past shakes him out of his complacency, forcing him to see what he’s really accomplished, and at what cost.