Alien Abductions, Poverty, and Frisky Cows: A Review of Juan Pablo Villalobos’s “Quesadillas”

Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos; translated by Rosalind Harvey Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 168 p. Poverty haunts in meticulous ways in Quesadillas, Juan Pablo Villalobos’s second novel. There are the ways that its narrator’s family can be organized: their academic father has given each child a name rooted in the classics. Orestes, the second oldest, here recounts the story of a life on the margins of society, his parents insisting on their presence in the middle class, the minutiae of […]

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