Book cover for Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos
2014 Released
192 Pages
3-4 Hours
Ebook Unavailable
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Fsg OriginalsISBN 9780374533953
Translated by Rosalind Harvey

A brilliant new comic novel from "a linguistic virtuoso" (José Antonio Aguado, Diari de Terrassa)

It's the 1980s in Lagos de Moreno--a town where there are more cows than people, and more priests than cows--and a poor family struggles to overcome the bizarre dangers of living in Mexico. The father, a high-school civics teacher, insists on practicing and teaching the art of the insult, while the mother prepares hundreds of quesadillas to serve to their numerous progeny: Aristotle, Orestes, Archilochus, Callimachus, Electra, Castor, and Pollux. Confined to their home, the family bears witness to the revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party and their umpteenth electoral fraud. This political upheaval is only the beginning of Orestes's adventures and his uproarious crusade against the boredom of rustic life and the tyranny of his older brother.
Both profoundly moving and wildly funny, Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos's Quesadillas is a satiric masterpiece, chock-full of inseminated cows, Polish immigrants, religious pilgrims, alien spacecraft, psychedelic watermelons, and many, many "your mama" insults.

Juan Pablo Villalobos

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Rosalind Harvey

Translated by

Rosalind Harvey is a literary translator and educator from the UK. Harvey's work has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, Guardian First Book Award, and the Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize, amongst others. Harvey is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Arts Foundation Fellow, a committee member of the Translators Association, and a founding member of the Emerging Translators Network.

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