When Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa died at 89 in Lima in 2025, many Latin American commentators in mainstream and social media struck a similar note: he was a great writer despite his political views. Vargas Llosa was a forceful and outspoken classical liberal, pro-Western and pro-market.

The first thing a young Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) learned in his conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was to value writing that was deliberate, restrained, and clear. Bioy dates this revelation to sometime between 1931 and 1946, before he began the diary that would chronicle their friendship, a record that starts in May 1947 and ends in 1989, three years after Borges’ death. Long considered a cult object among Spanish-speaking readers, Borges — the title of this 700-page diary — is set to be released in English for the first time in October 2026 by NYRB Classics, in a translation by Valerie Miles.