David Unger is the Guatemalan-born translator of Mr. President, and has received Guatemala’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Literature Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He is also the author of several novels, including The Mastermind, The Price of Escape: A Novel, and Life in the Damn Tropics: A Novel, and he has translated more than a dozen books from Spanish into English. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Guernica, and Bomb Magazine. In Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Mr. President (Penguin Classics), the egomaniacal dictator of an unnamed country schemes to dispose of a political adversary and maintain his grip on power. As tyranny takes hold, everyone is forced to choose between compromise and death. The book was inspired by Asturias’ life under the regime of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera of Guatemala, where it was banned for many years. Infused with exuberant lyricism, Mayan symbolism, and Guatemalan vernacular, it is at once a surrealist masterpiece, a blade-sharp satire of totalitarianism, and a gripping portrait of psychological terror.
