Peruvian narrative has undergone a dynamic resurgence since the early 1990s, after the predominance in the 1980s of the short story and of poetry (especially by female writers), with the exception of the continuing novelistic projects of Mario Vargas Llosa and Alfredo Bryce Echenique (writing predominantly from outside Peru). Within this dynamic resurgence, which solicits urgent critical analysis, the bipolar, oppositional stances of Jaime Bayly (talk-show host and leading exponent of literatura light) and Iván Thays (university lecturer, literary critic and advocate of narrativa culta) stand out as leading alternatives, or as part of what will be understood in this book as the form of a frozen, postmodern dialectic. At the same time as Bayly's seven mass-marketed and hugely successful books have pressed into service a ‘high’ cultural and reactionary response by Thays, a new and highly politicized project has arisen in the 2000s, which has enriched and complemented this bipolar narrative: Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ two novels to date blend aesthetic and political challenges and build on elements of Bayly's light narrative and Thays’ self-conscious reflections on writing, as well as reworking techniques inherited from Vargas Llosa's novela política. The object of this book is to study these three most important writers of contemporary Peruvian (popular) culture and to explore the ways in which their narrative texts reflect a mediation between the national and the international in terms of cultural, historical and theoretical concepts such as the postmodernization of contemporary culture, globalization and the relationship between culture and society/politics in a neo-liberal market economy that is also marked by pressing social problems. In order to offer an original study of the Peruvian narrative of the 1990s and 2000s, four chapters will consider how Bayly, Thays and Benavides engage issues of mass culture/mediatization, what their relationship is to social issues, how far they can be understood in terms of postmodernity or as a reaction to it and how they call into question or reaffirm the autonomy of the aesthetic in relation to the market. A central preoccupation running through this book is to give a sense of the specificities of Peruvian cultural production and how theoretical readings might deal with them.