El llano en llamas

El llano en llamas / The Burning Plain

Short stories and novellas , 1953

Editorial RM

Pages: 176

An iconic collection of short stories that changed the course of Mexican and Latin American literature.

Since its publication in 1953, Juan Rulfo’s The Burning Plain (El Llano en llamas) has become Mexico’s most significant and most translated collection of short fiction. Set largely in a distressed rural region of the state of Jalisco known as El Llano Grande (the burning plain of the title), the seventeen stories of this anthology trace the lives of characters in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the Cristero Revolt (1926–1929). A father carries his fatally wounded son through the night in search of healing; a young girl’s prized cow is swept away by a flood, along with her family’s harvest; and a group of campesinos spend all day walking across the immense, barren Llano that the government has given them to farm. Through it all, Rulfo rejects moralizing and nostalgia, capturing instead the hushed reality of a landscape and people marked by violence and the weight of hardship and injustice.

Rulfo’s writing, often compared in importance to that of William Faulkner, Anton Chekov, and Gabriel García Marquez, is characterized by a laconic literary prose and the distinctive language heard throughout the rural communities of southern Jalisco. 

Seventy years after its first publication in Spanish, Rulfo’s work speaks to a new generation of readers.

“Juan Rulfo's fifteen tales of rural folk prove him to be one of the master storytellers of modern Mexico.... Rulfo has an eye for the depths of the human soul, an ear for the 'still sad music of humanity,' and a gift for communicating what takes place internally and externally in man.” Houston Post

“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.” Valeria Luiselli, The New York Times

“Getting to know Juan Rulfo’s works pointed me along me the path I was seeking for my own books. I often go back to them and read them all over again, and I always find myself once more the innocent victim of the same astonishment as when I read them for the first time. There are no more than three hundred pages in total, but that is almost as many – and I believe they are as enduring – as those we know of by Sophocles. Such is my admiration for Rulfo.” Gabriel García Márquez