“Chalk Drawings,” by Aziz Hazara © The artist. Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata, India

With David Unger’s brilliant translation of Mr. President (Penguin Classics, $17.99), by the Guatemalan Nobel Prize–winner Miguel Asturias, readers are newly invited to encounter the author’s extraordinary and darkly prescient satire of life under brutal dictatorship—a fiction begun in 1922, finished in 1933, and not published in wide circulation until it appeared in Argentina in 1948.

This edition, which includes a foreword by the Peruvian writer and fellow Nobelist Mario Vargas Llosa, and an introduction by the eminent scholar Gerald Martin, endeavors to confirm Asturias’s position…