El Llano in flames

When asked by an admirer, ‘What do you feel when you write?’, author Juan Rulfo is said to have replied, ‘Remorse’.
Remorse is not always a given in El Llano in flames, where lines are crossed and circumstances rarely forgive. This is rural Mexico after the Revolution: there is danger, upheaval and not much in the way of material improvement. Soldiers are repaid for their service with plots in the desert. A young girl loses her dowry cow in a flood. A peasant militiaman goes on the rampage.
These stories – now classics of Latin American literature – have the spare, unadorned quality of oral testimony as told by the wicked, the unworldly, the chancers, the murderous and the sorry. There is beauty here, but it is the raw, unnerving beauty of the truth.
This new translation by Stephen Beechinor brings Juan Rulfo’s remarkable stories to English-language readers beyond North America for the first time since the stories were first published in Spanish in 1953. New foreword for Structo Press by Dylan Brennan.