Quesadillas

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, & 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 & 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, & Pollux. Confined to their home, the family bears witness to the revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party & their umpteenth electoral fraud. This political upheaval is only the beginning of Orestes's adventures & his uproarious crusade against the boredom of rustic life & the tyranny of his older brother.

Both profoundly moving & wildly funny, Juan Pablo Villalobos's Quesadillas is a satiric masterpiece, chock-full of inseminated cows, Polish immigrants, religious pilgrims, alien spacecraft, psychedelic watermelons, & many, many "your mama" insults.

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Juan Pablo Villalobos was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1973. He’s the author of Down the Rabbit Hole (2011), Quesadillas (2013) & I'll Sell You a Dog (2016). His novels have been translated into fifteen languages. He writes for several publications including Letras Libres, Gatopardo, Granta & the English Pen blog, & translates Brazilian literature into Spanish. He lived in Barcelona for several years, then moved to Brazil, & is now back in Spain. He is married with two Mexican-Brazilian-Italian-Catalan children.