Juan Pablo Villalobos

Quesadillas

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 is struggling to get by. The father, a school teacher, insists on practising 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. The family witnesses a revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party and its umpteenth electoral fraud. This political upheaval is only the beginning of Orestes’ adventures and his uproarious crusade against the boredom of rustic life and the tyranny of his older brother.

In Quesadillas Juan Pablo Villalobos serves up a wild banquet. Chock-full of inseminated cows, Polish immigrants, parading pilgrims, alien spacecraft and psychedelic watermelons, almost anything goes in this madcap Mexican satire of politics and class.

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More Info

  • With an introduction by Neel Mukherjee.
  • Read more about Juan Pablo Villalobos on our authors’ page.
  • Villalobos’ first novel Down the Rabbit Hole was shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
  • Readers of Spanish may be interested to read more reviews and other thoughts posted on Villalobos’ website.
  • If you had subscribed to And Other Stories before before Quesadillas went to the printers, you would have received one of the first copies of the book – in which all subscribers are thanked by name – before its official publication, as well as up to five other And Other Stories titles per year. Find out about subscribing to upcoming titles here.
Print status: Available
Translator: Rosalind Harvey
Original language: Spanish
Format: B-format paperback
Publication date: 7 January 2016
ISBN: 9781908276698
Ebook ISBN: 9781908276230
Availability: UK, Europe and Commonwealth (excl. Canada)
Number of pages: 192