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 Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. His single story collection, 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 and are delivered in a spare and exquisite voice. This new translation by Stephen Beechinor marks the first time this masterpiece of Latin American literature has been made available to English-language readers beyond North America since the book was first published in Spanish in 1953.