Juan Pablo Villalobos

The trip home from hell: everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, when the protagonist, who has emigrated, returns to Mexico. JP, the protagonist, returns to his hometown in Mexico after many years abroad, where he has a peaceful life. He returns to help his siblings care for his parents, who are now elderly. What should have been a brief visit becomes the visit from hell and JP a murder suspect. A photo of a bullet circulates, and everyone seems determined to offer him pills of dubious origin: could they be melatonin, tranquilizers, amphetamines, poison? Weaving outright hilarity with wry tenderness, Villalobos tells of the changes time has wrought on the family, friends and town the protagonist once knew. Praise for Juan Pablo Villalobos: 'Funny, convincing, appalling . . . a punch-packer.' Ali Smith 'Savagely funny.' Lili Wright, New York Times **

For this striking, stripped-down account of youth immigration, Villalobos interviewed teens at various stages of the immigration process to illustrate their stories - the physical and emotional difficulties of their travels. He then changed certain elements of these stories in order to protect the children's identities. Each chapter brings forth the voice of one young immigrant's experience, from crossing the Mexican desert to gang violence to the 'freezers' at ICE detention centres. Together, these teen voices paint a vivid and thought-provoking picture of US-Central American immigration and the American refugee crisis, which will resonate with young readers, educators, and fans of his adult fiction alike.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award and the 2012 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

Juan Pablo Villalobos's fifth novel adopts a gentle, fable-like tone, approaching the problem of racism from the perspective that any position as idiotic as xenophobia can only be fought with sheer absurdity. In an unnamed city, colonised by an unnamed world power, an immigrant named Gaston makes his living selling exotic vegetables to eateries around the city. He has a dog called Kitten, who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and a good friend called Max, who's in a deep depression after being forced to close his restaurant. Meanwhile, Max's son, Pol, a scientist away on a scientific expedition into the Arctic, can offer little support. Gaston begins a quest, or rather three: he must search for someone to put his dog to sleep humanely; he must find a space in which to open a new restaurant with Max; and he must look into the truth behind the news being sent back by Pol: that human life may be the by-product of an ancient alien attempt at colonisation . . . and those aliens might intend to make a return visit.

The history of walls – as a way to keep people in or out – is also the history of people managing to get around, over and under them. From the Berlin Wall and the Mexico–US border, to the barbed wire fences of Bangladesh’s refugee camps, the short stories in this anthology explore the barriers that have sought to divide communities and nations, and their traumatic effects on people’s lives and histories. At a time when more walls are being built than are being brought down, All Walls Collapse brings together writing from across national, ethnic and linguistic borders, challenging the political impulse to separate and segregate, and celebrating the role of literature in traversing division.

'I don't expect anyone to believe me,' warns the narrator of this novel, a Mexican student called Juan Pablo Villalobos. He is about to fly to Barcelona on a scholarship when he's kidnapped in a bookshop and whisked away by thugs to a basement. The gangsters are threatening his cousin-a wannabe entrepreneur known to some as 'Projects' and to others as 'dickhead' - who is gagged and tied to a chair. The thugs say Juan Pablo must work for them. His mission? To make Laia, the daughter of a corrupt politician, fall in love with him. He accepts . . . though not before the crime boss has forced him at gunpoint into a discussion on the limits of humour in literature. Part campus novel, part gangster thriller, I Don't Expect Anyone to Believe Me is Villalobos at his best. Exuberantly foul-mouthed and intellectually agile, this hugely entertaining novel finds the light side of difficult subjects - immigration, corruption, family loyalty and love - in a world where the difference between comedy and tragedy depends entirely on who's telling the joke.

Una novela desternillante sobre el miedo a ser invadidos. Una historia sobre dos amigos, un barrio y unas cuantas teorías conspiranoicas. Trece mil ochocientos millones de años después del nacimiento de nuestro Universo, en una ciudad del poniente, dos amigos inmigrantes enfrentan una crisis vital. Max acaba de perder su restaurante porque el propietario no le ha renovado el contrato de alquiler; Gastón debe dormir a su perro, Gato, diagnosticado con una enfermedad terminal. Max se encierra en el local del restaurante a vegetar, mientras Gastón deambula por las páginas de esta novela intentando rescatarlo. El cierre del restaurante no es más que otro signo de la imparable transformación del barrio, que inquieta y subleva a los aborígenes contra los lejanorientales, los nororientales y los proximorientales. Pero Gastón y Max, aunque viven desde hace más de treinta años ahí, también llegaron de fuera, de las antiguas Colonias del lejano oeste. Por llegar, llegan además el padre de Max, en fuga de la justicia por un asunto de corrupción, y el hijo de Max, Pol, un científico que viene desde la Tundra hablando sobre bacterias, semillas, colonizaciones e invasiones de otros planetas... Estos y muchos otros personajes protagonizan una trama en la que las pequeñas historias de un barrio cualquiera se entrecruzan con las más rocambolescas teorías de la conspiración. Una novela que destila fina ironía, escrita contra el odio y que nos habla de la amistad, de la paternidad, de la herencia, de la familia y del amor. «¿Estamos solos?», se pregunta el autor, y, como el agente Fox Mulder, parece sugerir: «No estamos solos.» «Sus novelas son hilarantes porque tratan los asuntos más graves. Se expresa con la lucidez del que sabe que nos engañan. Villalobos –algo así como un Kurt Vonnegut en habla hispana– se aleja de los clichés con los que carga su tierra» (Miqui Otero, El Confidencial). «Villalobos ha encontrado un tono y un ritmo propios, que no se parecen a ningún otro en la narrativa mexicana actual. Hace reír con el absurdo y al hacerlo muestra el sinsentido del mundo» (Fernando García Ramírez, Letras Libres). «Escribe con soltura inusitada, y sabe conseguir páginas realmente memorables» (Élmer Mendoza, El Universal). «Juan Pablo Villalobos construye con paciencia infinita y elegante modestia el perfil de la nueva literatura mexicana» (Mónica Maristain, Gente). «Tiene el ojo de un novelista para los detalles, el de un pintor para las imágenes y el de un poeta para los giros verbales» (Kirkus Reviews). «Villalobos es una especie de Proust en miniatura» (Publishers Weekly). «Pocos autores escriben con una exuberancia tan poética y nerviosa como la de Juan Pablo Villalobos» (The Big Issue).

Long before he was the taco seller whose ‘Gringo Dog’ recipe made him famous throughout Mexico City, our hero was an aspiring artist: an artist, that is, till his would-be girlfriend was stolen by Diego Rivera, and his dreams snuffed out by his hypochondriac mother. Now our hero is resident in a retirement home, where fending off boredom is far more gruelling than making tacos. Plagued by the literary salon that bumps about his building’s lobby and haunted by the self-pitying ghost of a neglected artist, Villalobos’ old man can’t help but misbehave. He antagonises his neighbours, tortures American missionaries with passages from Adorno, flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer, and in short does everything that can be done to fend off the boredom of retirement and old age . . . while still holding a beer. A delicious take-down of pretensions to cultural posterity, I’ll Sell You a Dog is a comic novel whose absurd inventions, scurrilous antics and oddball characters are vintage Villalobos.

A brilliant new comic novel from "a linguistic virtuoso" (Jos Antonio Aguado, Diari de Terrassa) It's the 1980s in Lagos de Moreno--a town where there are more cows than people, and 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 and 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, and Pollux. Confined to their home, the family bears witness to the revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party and their umpteenth electoral fraud. This political upheaval is only the beginning of Orestes's adventures and his uproarious crusade against the boredom of rustic life and the tyranny of his older brother. Both profoundly moving and wildly funny, Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos's Quesadillas is a satiric masterpiece, chock-full of inseminated cows, Polish immigrants, religious pilgrims, alien spacecraft, psychedelic watermelons, and many, many "your mama" insults.

It’s the 1980s in Lagos de Moreno – a town where there are more cows than people, and more priests than cows – and a poor family is struggling to get by. The father, a school teacher, insists on practising and 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 and Pollux. The family witnesses a revolt against the Institutional Revolutionary Party and its umpteenth electoral fraud. This political upheaval is only the beginning of Orestes’ adventures and his uproarious crusade against the boredom of rustic life and the tyranny of his older brother. In Quesadillas Juan Pablo Villalobos serves up a wild banquet. Chock-full of inseminated cows, Polish immigrants, parading pilgrims, alien spacecraft and psychedelic watermelons, almost anything goes in this madcap Mexican satire of politics and class.

"A brief and majestic debut." --Mat as N spolo, El MundoTochtli lives in a palace. He loves hats, samurai, guillotines, and dictionaries, and what he wants more than anything right now is a new pet for his private zoo: a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. But Tochtli is a child whose father is a drug baron on the verge of taking over a powerful cartel, and Tochtli is growing up in a luxury hideout that he shares with hit men, prostitutes, dealers, servants, and the odd corrupt politician or two. Long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award, Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.