The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings Summary and Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. A masterful storyteller whose dark view of the world isn't entirely cheerless or without humor and who deserves to be better known." - Kirkus

"Although many of these fragments are without context, Rulfo's memorable images, like a man who 'fled town amid a shower of screams, but with the '38 super' still in his hand... his finger dripping as it remained clenched on the trigger' help to fill out the oeuvre of an important Mexican writer." - Publishers Weekly

"To read Rulfo's stories is to inhabit Mexico and, in the process, to have Mexico inhabit you." - Oscar Casares, NPR

"Rulfo's work is at its core about people who do their best to unburden themselves of the stories they never stop telling." - Peter Orner, The Rumpus

"Far from the simple imitative realism of earlier Latin American novels, his essentialist work is on the level of myth and archetype." - Rockwell Gray, The Chicago Tribune

"[Rulfo's] work is built on an intricate lattice of time and space, but it doesn't seem planned so much as grown, something natural, inevitable, efficient, and effortless. All its paradoxes are innate." - Slate

"You can read Rulfo's slight but dense body of work in a couple of days, but that represents only a first step into territories that are yet to be definitively mapped. Their exploration is one of the more remarkable journeys in literature." - The Guardian (UK)

"His is a text in which meaning is subsumed into an architecture of shadows and whispers, and into the ebb and flow of the vernacular." - The Independent (UK)

"My profound exploration of Juan Rulfo's work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing." - Gabriel García Márquez

"The only Mexican novelist who has given us an image - instead of just a description - of our landscape." - Octavio Paz

"Octavio Paz has said that Juan Rulfo 'is the only Mexican novelist who has given us an image - instead of just a description - of our landscape. By the same token we could say that Josephine Sacabo is the only photographer who has given us an image of that most elusive of landscapes conceived by Juan Rulfo - Cosala." - Buenos Aires Herald

"This is a book that is valuable in itself for its expression of the narrative talent of Juan Rulfo...Apart from the first images, which are truly cinematic and serve to introduce the protagonist...the reader soon forgets that he is reading a storyline written for the cinema." - Evodia Escalante, Casa Del Tiempo

This information about The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Juan Rulfo (1917-1986), Mexico's most important and influential author of the twentieth century, received numerous awards in his lifetime, including the esteemed Cervantes Prize, and his work served as the literary precursor of "magical realism."

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