The Burning Plain

Rulfo airs a worldview dark enough to make Cormac McCarthy look like P.G. Wodehouse...Spectral stories shot through with violence and sorrow, and beautiful for all that. (Kirkus, Starred Review) Weatherford’s fresh new translation of this seminal 1953 collection from Mexican writer Rulfo (1917–1986) lays bare the enigmatic potency of its stories about love, poverty, and violence…As characters trek across vast and arduous desert terrain, it can be hard to distinguish the real from the imaginary, which adds to the book’s power…This will please Rulfo’s devotees and earn him new ones. (Publishers Weekly) Among contemporary writers in Mexico today [1959], Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals. (New York Times Book Review) What is remarkable about these sketches is that the characters are rendered with deep honesty; their faults are highlighted, celebrated in a way that is reminiscent of Chekhov's peasants. (Publishers Weekly) To read Rulfo's stories is to inhabit Mexico and, in the process, to have Mexico inhabit you. (NPR) Reading these stories during an election year where political rhetoric about violent immigrants at the US/Mexico border is being used to rabble rouse America’s rural poor highlights how little the power structures have changed. Rulfo doesn’t provide any false hope. Instead, he allows Mexico’s agricultural working class to speak and act for themselves, painting a full and complex picture of economic refugees, no matter their origins, as if to say: You, too, would act like his characters if put in their place. (Full Stop)

Rulfo airs a worldview dark enough to make Cormac McCarthy look like P.G. Wodehouse...Spectral stories shot through with violence and sorrow, and beautiful for all that. (Kirkus, Starred Review) Weatherford’s fresh new translation of this seminal 1953 collection from Mexican writer Rulfo (1917–1986) lays bare the enigmatic potency of its stories about love, poverty, and violence…As characters trek across vast and arduous desert terrain, it can be hard to distinguish the real from the imaginary, which adds to the book’s power…This will please Rulfo’s devotees and earn him new ones. (Publishers Weekly) Among contemporary writers in Mexico today [1959], Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals. (New York Times Book Review) What is remarkable about these sketches is that the characters are rendered with deep honesty; their faults are highlighted, celebrated in a way that is reminiscent of Chekhov's peasants. (Publishers Weekly) To read Rulfo's stories is to inhabit Mexico and, in the process, to have Mexico inhabit you. (NPR) Reading these stories during an election year where political rhetoric about violent immigrants at the US/Mexico border is being used to rabble rouse America’s rural poor highlights how little the power structures have changed. Rulfo doesn’t provide any false hope. Instead, he allows Mexico’s agricultural working class to speak and act for themselves, painting a full and complex picture of economic refugees, no matter their origins, as if to say: You, too, would act like his characters if put in their place. (Full Stop)

Juan Rulfo (1917–1986), who was born in the Mexican state of Jalisco, is best known for two seminal works that altered the course of Mexican and Latin American literature: El Llano en llamas (1953) and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955).

Douglas J. Weatherford is a professor of Hispanic literature and film at Brigham Young University. In addition to The Burning Plain , he has also translated Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and The Golden Cockerel and Other Writings .