In his most celebrated work, Mexican writer Francisco Rojas Gonzalez offers a rare blend of literature and indigenous anthropology. Inspired by his fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, these 13 stories reflect the author's preoccupation with the totality of Mexican life and capture his heralded ability to penetrate the contradictions of human nature. The book is a dramatic presentation of myths, religious beliefs, and customs of Mexican Indians framed in their rigid, overpowering code of ethics. It served as the basis for the 1954 film Roots, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1955.
In his most celebrated work, Mexican writer Francisco Rojas Gonzalez offers a rare blend of literature and indigenous anthropology. Inspired by his fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico, these 13 stories reflect the author's preoccupation with the totality of Mexican life and capture his heralded ability to penetrate the contradictions of human nature. The book is a dramatic presentation of myths, religious beliefs, and customs of Mexican Indians framed in their rigid, overpowering code of ethics. It served as the basis for the 1954 film Roots, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival of 1955.
Francisco Rojas Gonzalez was a Mexican author, screenwriter, diplomat, and ethnographer. He was the recipient of a National Prize for Literature and is known for having a significant impact on mid-20th-century Mexican literature and cinema. Robert S. Rudder is an editor and translator of several noteworthy Latin American novels. Gloria Arjona is the translator of numerous Spanish-language books. They are the cotranslators of The City of Kings and Nazarin .
"It is Gonzalez's insights into this world that have made this work
a minor classic for half a century in Mexico . . . This slim but
facinating volume sheds a good deal of light, in absorbing detail,
on the lives of remote Mexican tribes, many of which are on the
verge of extinction." Publishers Weekly"
"Short story lovers will applaud this graceful English translation
. . . by a remarkably talented Mexican fiction writer (1904-1951)
whose anthropological fieldwork among Indian villages in remote
locations was reflected in his intense stories . . . The triumphs
and disasters of otherwise unimportant people are the themes Rojas
Gonzalez sympathetically explores. He writes about noble souls, in
exquisitely precise prose." Booklist"
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