Quesadillas : a novel / Juan Pablo Villalobos ; translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey ; introduction by Neel Mukherjee.

"Originally published in Spanish in 2012 as Si viviéramos en un lugar normal by Editorial Anagrama, S.A., Barcelona, Spain. English translation originally published in 2013 by And Other Stories, Great Britain"--Title page verso.

"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, 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, 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"--Provided by publisher.