Burning Plain

A journey through the desert of the Mexican soul.
Little more than dust. And silence.

Published in 1953, this collection of short stories holds captive a violent beauty: generations submerged in drought and oblivion.

The dead inhabit, more than the living, a haunted land. 
Absent fathers. Wandering children.

There are no heroes. There are survivors. Men consumed by guilt. Abandoned women, condemned children. Tenderness, when it emerges, is a shadow. Brief.

Juan Rulfo, born in 1917 in Mexico, wrote little, but enough to become a myth. With Plain in Flames and the novel Pedro Páramo, he forever changed Latin American literature. He was an orphan, a civil servant, a photographer. He wrote as one burns the last pieces of their own soul. He dismantled rural literature and put his fingers into the wound of the Mexican soul.

Gabriel García Márquez acknowledged that, without Rulfo, One Hundred Years of Solitude would have been another book.