Pedro Páramo

Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955. First edition. original cloth, custom box. Very Good/Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF RULFO'S MASTERPIECE, ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL WORKS OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE. "When Susan Sontag… calls 'Pedro Paramo', 'one of the masterpieces of 20th-century world literature,' she is not being hyperbolic. With its dense interweaving of time, its routine interaction of the living and the dead, its surreal sense of the everyday, and with simultaneous – and harmonious – coexistence of apparently incompatible realities, this brief novel by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo strides through unexplored territory with a sure (truncated) and determined step…

"When it appeared in 1955, ‘Pedro Paramo’ shook the foundations of Latin American literature, then marked (with obvious exceptions – Borges, for one) by a kind of straight-ahead realism that pushed against no barriers. It was as if William Faulkner had unleashed 'As I Lay Dying' on a literary world ruled by James Fenimore Cooper.

"Such has been the influence of 'Pedro Paramo' that as tribute, Gabriel Garcia Marquez included a sentence from it in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ and, according to Ms. Sontag, knows the whole book by heart" (James Polk, New York Times, August 6, 1995).

Garcia Marquez has also called his discovery of "Pedro Paramo" life-changing, showing him the way for the creation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955. Octavo, original cloth; custom box. Some minor soiling to cloth and edges of text; overall in excellent, near-fine condition. Without the exceedingly rare original dust jacket. RARE. (Inventory #: 2934)