Juan Rulfo, 1917-1986, is one of the three greatest writers of twentieth-century Mexico together with Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. A Companion to Juan Rulfo is the most comprehensive modern study of Rulfo. The first sections situate his life and work in the historical and political context of the Mexican Revolution and Cristero Wars and within the interlinking currents of specifically national and wider Western literary and cultural traditions.Later sections offer detailed analyses of the short stories, El Llano en llamas, the novel Pedro Paramo, the novella El gallo de oro and of Rulfo’s substantial photographic work, the importance of which has only recently been grasped. Throughout the study the focus is to bring into a productive dialogue the different dimensions of Rulfo’s texts: the materiality of his hauntingly strange poetic prose, the disturbing instability of meaning and identity, the alienation caused by violence and injustice.

Steven Boldy is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Cambridge.