Miguel Ángel Asturias

Deep in the mountain forests of Guatemala, a community of Indigenous Mayans—the “men of maize”—serves as stewards to sacred corn crops. When profiteering outsiders encroach on their territory and threaten to abuse the fertile land, they enter a bloody struggle to protect their way of life. Blurring the lines between history and mythology, Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias’s lush, dream-like work offers a prescient warning against the loss of ancestral wisdom and the environmental destruction set in motion by colonial oppression and capitalist greed.

Social protest and poetry; reality and myth; nostalgia for an uncorrupted, golden past; sensual human enjoyment of the present; 'magic' rather than lineal time, and, above all, a tender, compassionate love for the living, fertile, wondrous land and the struggling, hopeful people of Guatemala.

The title Hombres de maíz refers to the Maya Indians' belief that their flesh was made of corn.

“It is an overstuffed, mystical, and beguiling masterpiece.” Parker Hatley, Los Angeles Review of Books

“In the opening pages of this novel, conceived in the 1920s and published in 1949, Asturias, an extraordinary visionary, anticipates the following themes: the neocolonial invasion of land and the natural world; guerrilla action in defense of it; feminism (there are also women in Men of Maize); the relationship between human beings and animals, trees, and plants; the progressive alienation of our communication systems; and ecology (both mental and natural) and climate change interwoven with the issues of memory, uprooting, and forgetting. In other words, he anticipates what happened to us between the 1960s and 1980s and what is happening now. [...] Its moment has perhaps arrived. (Alas).” —Gerald Martin, Babelia, El País.