The People of Paper
by Salvador Plascencia
Characters who know they're in a novel. They revolt.
For you if
you want fiction that breaks every rule about what fiction is allowed to do
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A Mexican immigrant community in El Monte, California, wages war against their author — literally. Characters organize to hide their thoughts from the narrator who keeps exposing them. Plascencia writes himself into the novel and his characters rebel against his control. Experimental, funny, heartbroken, and completely original. A dispatch about immigration, loss, and storytelling that uses the novel form to argue about who gets to tell whose story.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Mexico • Latin America
- Voice
- Written by a Mexican author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Like Water for Chocolate(1992)
dir. Alfonso Arau
Forbidden love, served through food.
In early-1900s Mexico, Tita is forbidden by family tradition from marrying the man she loves, so she pours her longing into the food she cooks — food that carries her emotions, sometimes literally, into everyone who eats it. Adapted from Laura Esquivel's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in making a kitchen the site of rebellion — Tita's cooking becomes the one language her mother can't control or silence. Pedagogical in showing how inherited "duty" polices women's desire generation after generation, and what it costs to break that chain.
Pedro Páramo(2024)
dir. Rodrigo Prieto
A ghost town where the dead won't stop talking.
A man travels to his late mother's hometown to find the father he never knew, only to discover Comala is a ghost town in the most literal sense — populated by the dead, still narrating the tyranny of the cacique who once ruled it. Adapted from Juan Rulfo's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in blurring the line between the living and the dead until power and guilt outlast the man who held them — Pedro Páramo's tyranny haunts Comala long after his death. Pedagogical in showing how one man's greed can hollow out an entire town's future.
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