How can a novel change the world? Do books still have the power to change reality and men? Two masters of contemporary world literature try to answer this very difficult question, revealing the secrets of their "writing workshop". Inviting Claudio Magris and Mario Vargas Llosa to confront their respective ideas about literature as "total experience", Renato Poma, director of the Italian Institute of Culture of Lima, underlines the solid link between the Peruvian Nobel Prize and the most prestigious intellectual And Italian writer: both believe that the main mission of literature is to investigate in that mysterious and intricate land that is the human spirit, in its most arcane springs and contradictions, in order to help us understand the chaos in which Our existence has been plunged. According to Vargas Llosa, in fact, a book is achieved when it is able to pull us out of the convoked current of our lives and drags us into a world where fiction appears more tangible and real than reality itself, and this movement of creation and mirror It allows us to orient ourselves better and to understand something more of ourselves. Claudio Magris, from his privileged point of view as a writer of the limits, shows us the extent to which literature is a medial place, an open space where the creative capacity of the writer to invent worlds and, at the same time, his inexhaustible tension Towards the truth. In this brief and fulminating dialogue, two of the most important intellectuals and writers of our time confess the intimate and passionate relationship that unites them to what is dearest to them and which, in a decisive way, has marked their lives. To reach a common and merciless conclusion: literature has the inescapable task of sinking its sharp leaves in the world and try to change it.