Juan Rulfo

A legendary classic of magic realism and the most important Mexican novel ever written.

Swearing to his dying mother that he'll find the father he has never met, a certain Pedro Páramo, Juan Preciado sets out across the barren plains of Mexico for Comala, the hallucinatory ghost town his father presided over like a feudal lord. Between the realms of the living and the dead, in fragments of dreams and the nightly whispers of Comala's ghosts, there emerges the tragic tale of Pedro Páramo and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul.

“The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable ... extraordinary.” Carlos Fuentes

“A simplicity and profundity worthy of Greek tragedy ... Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka.” Guardian

“That night I didn't sleep until I'd read it twice; not since I had read Kafka's Metamorphosis in a dingy boarding house in Bogotá, almost ten years earlier, had I felt so thunderstruck.” Gabriel García Márquez

“Pedro Páramo is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century's books.” Susan Sontag

“It makes more sense to map Rulfo within a constellation of writers like T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, writers who took literature to the frontiers of their languages, who wrote in a kind of ‘foreign’ tongue, in that they allowed strangeness to seep into the familiar and turn the everyday into the uncanny . . . I have no hesitation in saying that there is no novel more mesmerizing and paradigm-shifting.” —Valeria Luiselli, New York Times

“Rulfo’s novel constantly challenges the reader. It defies comprehension, with confusion and fragmentation central to what seems an unstable fictional world. The text vacillates between presence and absence, between reality and irreality, and even between life and death. At the same time, Rulfo’s writing is defined by a faith in the ability of diligent readers to discover interpretive possibilities hidden within the disintegration of the novel.”  Douglas J. Weatherford, Literary Hub