Perfection. Polished, clear and precise. Now I wish I could read them in the original...

An interesting, original, poignant, concisely written, bleak short story collection. There are fifteen fairly short stories, all about Mexican peasants and their harsh, tough, sometimes violent, lives. The main themes of these stories are vengeance, death and the struggle to survive. The characters tend to be lonely, living in a dry, parched plain. A number of stories are about the discord of father and son relationships.A very worthwhile read. (My University of Texan Press copy is 147 pages, wi...

F**k me this is good! As good as Pedro Paramo! Rulfo is a master, the equal of anyone anywhere anytime. These stories are so elemental they are as if hewn from stone. The opener, 'Macario', is a mini-miracle - a monologue by an idiot child so convincing we forget it is fiction, forget we are reading almost. And so it is with every story here. They don't 'jump off the page' like so many supposedly virtuosic feats of literary ventriloquism; they insinuate themselves quietly, seem to reach us intra...

About fifteen stories, almost all gems, bringing the hard, rough life in an extremely dry and barren area in Mexico to life. The language is simple, but the stories are rich and varied. The themes are poverty, revenge, jealousy, betrayal and death. Rulfo brings in his own way a tribute to the small people of the Llano. Read in a French translation, probably most approaching the original Spanish.

We don't say what we are thinking. We lost the will to speak a while back. We lost it because of the heat. You would be happy to talk elsewhere, but it is hard here. You talk here and the words become hot in your mouth from the outside heat, and they dry on your tongue until the breath is gone. (2)After having greatly appreciated Rulfo's novel Pedro Páramo, I decided to read his other major work, the short stories collected in The Plain in Flames, which took me surprisingly long to finish – all

Truly beautiful prose. The plots in themselves are ok, overall a pleasant read :)

An outstanding collection of snippets, ever-literary and uniquely blissfully Mexican. These stories are timeless. And it is precisely that quality, that of timelessness, which best describes the setting which pervades throughout these incendiary vignettes. The best are short enough to be parables--"We're Very Poor" (heart-wrenching), "The burning plain" (epic--aka where Cormack McCarthy got his prose) & "Anacleto Morones" (the anti "8 1/2") were my favorites. The leitmotifs are beautiful and mea...

Holding the spine of the book in the palm of my hand, having read Rulfo's great novel Pedro Páramo , I felt the sear of my skin before opening the front cover. This short story collection's primal bleakness, savagery, rumbled within. Hazemat gear in toe I pried open the book and stood back. My hand burnt, cracked the pain oozing upward, outward, I stared at the sparse simple prose. A style any writer might be proud of to cover many examples of a staid story line. An aesthetic which yearns to be

“You’ll be seeing that wind that blows over Luvina. It’s dark. They say because it’s full of volcano sand; anyway, it’s a black air. You’ll see it. It takes hold of things in Luvina as if it was going to bite them. And there are lots of days when it takes the roofs off the houses as if they were hats, leaving the bare walls uncovered. Then it scratches like it had nails: you hear it morning and night, hour after hour without stopping, scraping the walls, tearing off strips of earth, digging w

Longlisted for the 2020 Republic of Consciouness Prize Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, published in 1955, is hailed by many, most notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as a key development in Latin American, and indeed world, literature. However, I had not read his equally important short story collection El Llano en Llamas, published in 1955, so it was a delight to see it longlisted for my favourite literary prize. This is actually the third translation to English, although the first published outside of...

While I acknowledge the cultural significance of Rulfo's themes, I only felt intermittently engaged in my reading of these stories. In general I felt more drawn to the striking black-and-white illustrations done by Kermit Oliver (see also this fascinating profile of Oliver). Certain passages did have more of an effect, though, such as this one from the story 'Talpa': I'd never felt life so slow and violent as when we were trudging along with so many people, just like we were a swarm of worms a...

An awesome book. A series of related short stories from Mexico's turbulent revolutionary past. But the magic of the book is perhaps not the events of the stories themselves, as poignant and relevant as they are, ranging from childhood to nuns to livestock rustling. What I really enjoyed is the evocative language, the descriptions of people and places that make them come alive, and place the reader in that time and space. The gritty violence and desperate poverty that made up everyday life - in a...

A collection of searing tales from the wilds of early 20th century Mexico. This reminded me somewhat of Horacio Quiroga, in its focus on desperate and impoverished men on the edges of society, and its fascination with the brutality of the natural world. I quite enjoyed it, I’ve got another one in my bag waiting to be read.

Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020I finished this a couple of days ago, and I am still not sure how I feel about it. Rulfo's bleak and often violent portraits of hard lives on the Mexican llano or plain, told in simple, stark, spare language are undoubtedly impressively realised, but it is difficult to assess this new translation of a book that is 70 years old without having read the earlier translations aimed more at an American audience, or his more famous novella Pedro P...

I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize for UK small presses.It is the first full length publication of Structo Press, which is associated with the literary magazine Structo which contains “remarkable new short stories and poetry from all around the world, alongside essays and interviews with authors and others ….on the fiction side we tend towards the slipstream end of things, and encourage submission of works in translation.”. Structo Press has prev...

This is a collection of short stories that deserves at least one re-read, probably more. It feels like the kind of book that would reward multiple readings.I have to confess to a complete lack of knowledge of Rulfo until this book was long listed for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Given that a quick search on the Internet reveals that it is one of the most important Spanish language collections of short stories (quite possibly the most important), that’s clearly my misfortune and some...

It reads like a book of fables with no clear moral, except an uncompromising look at the solitude, uncertainty and the infinite weight of fate in early 20th century Mexico. It has many fun and lighthearted moments, mixed (as it happens in life) with really sad and frustrating ones. If you can read it in spanish, do. Half of it's value resides in the language the characters use. Simultaneously authentic and poetic. Lo sentí como un libro de fábulas sin moraleja clara. Únicamente una mirada despia...

If Death were to keep a journal, it would probably be very much like Rulfo's Burning Plain and Other Stories. Within these pages, Death's exploits are detailed as he slowly, patiently pursues his victims, torturing them beyond recognition, reducing them to the mere desire to live. Sounds terrible, I know, but I couldn't put the book down. Rulfo's words though unadorned and straightforward possess an incredible power capable of drawing the reader into a grim, waterless world. There isn't even any...

Short stories by a master story teller.

Of the best compiled as far as stories are concerned. Each one accomplishes his task, which consists in transporting us to an arid land, sad and abandoned by God.