The Burning Plain and Other Stories
Juan Rulfo · 1953
Rulfo's only story collection. Seventeen stories of rural Mexico: poverty, violence, memory, the dead who won't stay dead. The entire tradition of Latin American magical realism flows from this slim volume.
The case against
Seventeen stories, one register: drought, murder, futility, repeat. Rulfo's compression is legendary, but the ellipses cost you orientation; narrators go unnamed, timelines fold, and several stories end before you are sure what happened in them. In English the problem compounds, since the translations flatten a Spanish whose whole achievement is its spoken cadence.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
