Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro Paramo, 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. 49 photos.

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including José Martí, Bartolomé de las Casas, Rubén Darío, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic, and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow. The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought—recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth—can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic “New World” and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.

This work presents Juan Rulfo's cinematic second novel in English for the first time ever alongside several stories never before translated.

Juan Rulfo is one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Mexico, though he wrote only two books—the novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and the short story collection El llano en llamas (1953). First translated into English in 1967 as The Burning Plain, these starkly realistic stories create a psychologically acute portrait of poverty and dignity in the countryside at a time when Mexico was undergoing rapid industrialization following the upheavals of the Revolution. According to Ilan Stavans, the stories' "depth seems almost inexhaustible: with a few strokes, Rulfo creates a complex human landscape defined by desolation. These stories are lessons in morality. . . . They are also astonishing examples of artistic distillation." To introduce a new generation of readers to Rulfo's unsurpassable literary talents, this new translation repositions the collection as a classic of world literature. Working from the definitive Spanish edition of El llano en llamas established by the Fundación Juan Rulfo, Ilan Stavans and co-translator Harold Augenbram present fresh translations of the original fifteen stories, as well as two more stories that have not appeared in English before—"The Legacy of Matilde Arcángel" and "The Day of the Collapse." The translators have artfully preserved the author's "peasantisms," in appreciation of the distinctive voices of his characters. Such careful, elegiac rendering of the stories perfectly suits Rulfo's Mexico, in which people on the edge of despair nonetheless retain a sense of self, of integrity that will not be taken away.

A major figure in the history of post-Revolutionary literature in Mexico, Juan Rulfo received international acclaim for his brilliant short novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and his collection of short stories El llano en llamas (1953), translated as a collection here in English for the first time. In the transition of Mexican fiction from direct statements of nationalism and social protest to a concentration on cosmopolitanism, the works of Rulfo hold a unique position. These stories of a rural people caught in the play of natural forces are not simply an interior examination of the phenomena of their world; they are written for the larger purpose of showing the actions of humans in broad terms of reality.

Andrew Dempsey spent a decade to study the photographic collection of Juan Rulfo, composed of about 6,000 images. Ajoined work and both Daniele De Luigi selected 100 of them.This book is the first catalog of the knowledge of the entire file of Juan Rulfo and meets most of the genres he cultivated, properlyweighted: the buildings of Mexico, the many landscapes of the country, the life of small towns, artists, writers, friends and family of Juan Rulfo. It includes two texts by Juan Rulfo: one dedicated to HenriCartier-Bresson in the two periods of its passage through Mexicoand the other on the Mexican photographer Nacho Lopez. The authors also write about the selection of Juan Rulfo's photographyfrom a very knowledgeable in their respective areas ofcomnpetencia.

This is the first extended, English-language study to focus exclusively on the fiction of Juan Rulfo in over twenty years, analyzing a selection of short stories from Rulfo's collection and also two of the main characters of hismasterpiece, Pedro Páramo. This is the first extended, English-language study to focus exclusively on the fiction of Juan Rulfo in over twenty years. It contains innovative analyses of a selection of short stories from Rulfo's collection, El llano en llamas (1953). It also examines in great depth two of the main characters of Pedro Páramo (1955), Rulfo's masterpiece and only novel. The book shows how Rulfo's works can be read as exercises in irony directed againstthe rhetoric of post-Revolutionary Mexican governments. It also demonstrates the relevance of certain legacies of colony in Rulfo's use of irony. Successive Mexican governments promoted a vision of post-Revolutionary society founded on specific notions of ethnicity, family, nation, education, religion and rural politics. The author combines examination of the speeches, images and newspaper articles which disseminated this vision with incisive literary analyses of Rulfo's work. These analyses are informed both by his original theory of irony, based on "internal" and "external" referents, and by existing postcolonial theories, particularly those of Homi K. Bhabha. Amit Thakkar is a Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Lancaster University.