A legendary classic of magic realism and the most important Mexican novel ever written - with a new foreword by Gabriel García Márquez
Swearing to his dying mother that he'll find the father he has never met, a certain Pedro Páramo, Juan Preciado sets out across the barren plains of Mexico for Comala, the hallucinatory ghost town his father presided over like a feudal lord. Between the realms of the living and the dead, in fragments of dreams and the nightly whispers of Comala's ghosts, there emerges the tragic tale of Pedro Páramo and the town whose every corner holds the taint of his rotten soul.
“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
