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Book Cover for: Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo

Pedro Páramo

Juan Rulfo

A masterpiece of the surreal, this stunning novel from Mexico depicts a man's strange quest for his heritage. Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro Páramo, whom they fled from years ago, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala. Comala is a town alive with whispers and shadows--a place seemingly populated only by memory and hallucinations. Built on the tyranny of the Páramo family, its barren and broken-down streets echo the voices of tormented spirits sharing the secrets of the past.

First published to both critical and popular acclaim in 1955, Pedro Páramo represented a distinct break with earlier, largely "realist" novels from Latin America. Rulfo's entrancing mixture of vivid sensory images, violent passions, and inexplicable sorcery--a style that has come to be known as 'magical realism"--has exerted a profound influence on subsequent Latin American writers, from Jos' Donoso and Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Grove Press
  • Publish Date: Mar 10th, 1994
  • Pages: 128
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.60in - 5.10in - 0.30in - 0.25lb
  • EAN: 9780802133908
  • Categories: LiteraryHispanic & LatinoFamily Life - General

Praise for this book


"A strange, brooding novel. . . . Great immediacy, power, and beauty." --The Washington Post

"A powerful fascination . . . vivid and haunting; the style is a triumph." --New York Herald Tribune

"When Susan Sontag, in her foreword to this book, calls Pedro Páramo 'one of the masterpieces of 20th-century world literature, ' she is not being hyperbolic. With its dense interweaving of time, its routine interaction of the living and the dead, its surreal sense of the everyday, and with simultaneous--and harmonious--coexistence of apparently incompatible realities, this brief novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo strides through unexplored territory with a sure and determined step. . . . Having it now in all its depth and texture is a major event for which the publisher and the translator, Margaret Sayers Peden, deserve thanks." --James Polk, New York Times Book Review

"No reader interested in the vitality of 20th century Latin American fiction can afford to miss this work." --Rockwell Gray, Chicago Tribune

"As close to perfect as a piece of writing gets." --Sheila Farr, Seattle Weekly

"A modern classic. . . . Peden's lucid translation does justice to a tale that is firmly rooted in its own culture yet so fundamentally human in its focus that it speaks across cultural borders." --Publishers Weekly