Praise for Pedro Páramo:
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection
“[Pedro Páramo] shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way The Waste Land or Ulysses does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter . . . It is a story of all revolutions: the landless against the landlords, the dispossessed against the powerful. It is a story of usurpation, extraction and sexual violence. Of stealing land, settling it and exploiting it and its people. In other words, it is a story of nation-building in the Americas . . . It makes more sense to map Rulfo within a constellation of writers like T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka, who wrote in a kind of ‘foreign’ tongue, in that they allowed strangeness to seep into the familiar and turn the everyday into the uncanny . . . I began reading this third edition, [translated] by [Douglas J.] Weatherford, with skepticism. But I grew more and more enthusiastic as I went along. His translation is, by far, the best of Rulfo in English.”—Valeria Luiselli, New York Times Book Review
“A work of pitched contradiction . . . This magnificent language achieves the apocalyptic dread of the original . . . Weatherford’s translation captures the primeval struggle at its core . . . I think the new translation is worth all the effort that has gone into producing it. It moves the story forward, so to speak, amidst the wider tale of literature. And it is a gorgeously engaging read at that.”—Nick Hilden, The Millions
“For readers of Latin American fiction, Pedro Páramo is a founding text . . . Douglas J. Weatherford’s [translation] moves Rulfo’s lyricism into a melodic, recognizably American voice . . . Rulfo forged a new language for sadness that is uniquely Latin American.”—Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement
“A strange, brooding novel . . . Great immediacy, power, and beauty.”—Washington Post
“Among contemporary writers in Mexico today Juan Rulfo is expected to rank among the immortals.”—Selden Rodman, New York Times Book Review
“The essential Mexican novel, unsurpassed and unsurpassable . . . Extraordinary.”—Carlos Fuentes
“Pedro Páramo is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century’s books.”—Susan Sontag
“That night I didn’t sleep until I’d read it twice; not since I had read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a dingy boarding house in Bogotá, almost ten years earlier, had I been so overcome.”—Gabriel García Márquez
“A simplicity and profundity worthy of Greek tragedy . . . Wuthering Heights located in Mexico and written by Kafka.”—Guardian
“The silences yawn in Rulfo’s writing. Its rhythms seem to slow time, and reality’s edges fray into a strange gulf . . . Pedro Páramo is like hunting for a key in a building that is collapsing around you . . . One of the more remarkable journeys in literature.”―Chris Power
“Juan Rulfo’s novel defies logic. It is out to evade readers, to tease them for their attempts at understanding. Uncertainties, red herrings, and anxieties abound, all of which give Pedro Páramo its particular flavour.”―Full Stop
“This is the third time Pedro Páramo has been translated into English . . . and I can only celebrate that someone has tried so hard to preserve the author's unique voice. An outstanding edition and a game-changing translation.”―London Magazine
“A founding text for literature in Central and Latin America, revered by Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, this short novel is full of miraculous features.”―Bookmunch
