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 Tochtli 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. Down the Rabbit Hole, a masterful and darkly comic first novel, is the chronicle of a delirious journey to grant a child's wish.

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, and flirts with the revolutionary greengrocer. 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.

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.

'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.

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 brilliant new comic novel from "a linguistic virtuoso" (Jose 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.

"A brief and majestic debut." --Matias Nespolo, "El Mundo
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Tochtli 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.

En un futuro impreciso, Sebastian, un investigador independiente de inteligencia artificial descubre como su vida amorosa y su vida social empiezan a hacer mella por culpa de lo que parece ser un problema de alcoholismo. Sin embargo, dicho problema escondera problemas mas basicos que residen en la comunicacion humana. Mientras Sebastian y los demas personajes de la novela tratan de descubrir el origen de la conciencia para desarrollar un androide que pueda sentir como los humanos, asistiremos absortos a la incapacidad de cada uno de ellos para comunicarse directamente con los demas. Cyborgs tan cotidianos y aburridos que parecen inverosimiles; la mujer ideal, cargada de indecision e inseguridad; la mujer misteriosa, erotizante como el humo; el ciclista, bebedor puntual de las tres y treinta y tres de la manana; el camarero sonador con aspiraciones de filosofo; el poeta desgraciado que siempre cuelga de los techos; el jefe de investigacion que promueve la revelacion cientifica y esconde en cambio su homosexualidad; y finalmente Sebastian, el mas desgraciado de todos los personajes. Su dilema -entre el impulso por descubrir el origen de la conciencia y la mala conciencia por tratar de descubrirla- perfila una narracion mas bien leve, aparentemente inexistente, que devuelve el valor a las palabras (tan fingidas como creibles) frente a los hechos. Para aquellos que busquen simplemente una historia, resultara esta una narracion confusa llena de recovecos inexplicables, pero tampoco a ellos les dejara indiferentes un estilo cuidado tanto en el lenguaje como en esos pequenos gestos descuidados que traicionan las emociones de cada personaje (a veces el lector). Asistiremos pues en estas lineas, mas propias en ocasiones de un lenguaje cinematografico, al fracaso progresivo de la tecnica, que no es ni mas ni menos que el mismisimo fracaso de lo humano.