For a writer so reserved in what he saw into print, Juan Rulfo has had a disproportional influence on writers of literature in Spanish, and beyond, on a par with Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. El Llano in flames provides a pithy and moving expression of life in central and western Mexico in the decades following the Revolution. These stories have the quality of an oral testimony to harsh years, delivered in a spare and exquisite voice. They are amongst the best short stories ever written. This new translation marks the first time this masterpiece of Latin American literature been made available to English-language readers beyond North America since the book was first published in Spanish in 1953.