Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo (new translation)

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, new translation by Douglas J. Weatherford / ISBN 9780802160935 / 144-page paperback published in 2023 by Grove Press

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The highly influential masterpiece of Latin American literature, now published in a new, authoritative translation, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez

A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro Páramo is the otherworldly tale of one man’s quest for his lost father. That man swears to his dying mother that he will find the father he has never met—Pedro Páramo—but when he reaches the town of Comala, he finds it haunted by memories and hallucinations. There emerges the tragic tale of Páramo himself, and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul.

Although initially published to a quiet reception, Pedro Páramo was soon recognized as a major novel that has served as a touchstone text for writers including Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso. Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated Rulfo scholar Douglas J. Weatherford, and featuring a foreword by Gabriel García Márquez, this new edition of the novel cements its place as one of the seminal literary texts of the twentieth century.

“Among contemporary writers in Mexico today Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals.”—Selden Rodman, New York Times Book Review

“A strange, brooding novel . . . Great immediacy, power, and beauty.”—Washington Post

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

“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

“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 been so overcome.”—Gabriel García Márquez

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

Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) was born in Sayula, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. His collection of short stories, The Burning Plain, and Pedro Páramo established him as a major literary figure in Latin America.