The Burning Plain

Since its publication in 1953, Juan Rulfo’s The Burning Plain (El Llano en llamas) has become Mexico’s most significant and most translated collection of short fiction. Set largely in a distressed rural region of the state of Jalisco known as El Llano Grande (the burning plain of the title), the seventeen stories of this anthology trace the lives of characters in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the Cristero Revolt (1926–1929). A father carries his fatally wounded son through the night in search of healing; a young girl’s prized cow is swept away by a flood, along with her family’s harvest; and a group of campesinos spend all day walking across the immense, barren Llano that the government has given them to farm. Through it all, Rulfo rejects moralizing and nostalgia, capturing instead the hushed reality of a landscape and people marked by violence and the weight of hardship and injustice.

Rulfo’s writing, often compared in importance to that of William Faulkner, Anton Chekov, and Gabriel García Marquez, is characterized by a laconic literary prose and the distinctive language heard throughout the rural communities of southern Jalisco. These qualities come alive in Douglas J. Weatherford’s vibrant new rendition of Mexico’s most celebrated collection. Seventy years after its first publication in Spanish, Rulfo’s work speaks to a new generation of readers.

“Among contemporary writers in Mexico today [1959], Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals.”―The New York Times Book Review

“What is remarkable about these sketches is that the characters are rendered with deep honesty; their faults are highlighted, celebrated in a way that is reminiscent of Chekhov's peasants.”―Publishers Weekly