For the past few years, every Latin American novelist I know has been telling me how lavish, how grand, how transformative was the Argentinian novelist Ricardo Piglia's final project, a fictional journal in three volumes, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi Renzi being Piglia's fictional alter ego.The second installment of Argentine literary giant Ricardo Piglia's acclaimed bibliophilic trilogy follows his alter ego, Emilio Renzi, as his literary career begins to take off in the tumultuous years 1968-1975 running a magazine, working as a publisher, and encountering the literary stars among whom he would soon take his place: Borges, Puig, Roa Bastos, Piñera."One writes," Ricardo Piglia asserts, only "in order to know literature." Spanning the years 1968 to 1975, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: The Happy Years is a testament to Piglia's intimate, lifelong love affair with the written word. This second installment of the Argentinian master's diaries opens a window into a luminous literary community fertile with genius and ever-traipsing from bar to bar as well as into a convulsing Argentina racked by the death of Perón, guerilla warfare, and a bloody military coup and establishes itself as the definitive backbone of Piglia's monumental career.