The Night Buffalo

Guillermo Arriaga

Signed 2006 First Edition Atria Books, New York

Octavo. Gold letters on white spine over green boards. FINE in a like Brodart protected dust jacket. 228 pages. The author's breakthrough third novel. One of Guillermo Arriaga's finest achievements. Articles laid-in. The first appearance of the title in English and in the United States. Arriaga is a Mexican author, screenwriter, director and producer. Self-defined as "a hunter who works as a writer," he is best known for his Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay nominations for Babel and his screenplay for The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which received the 2005 Cannes Best Screenplay Award. Signed to San Francisco Chronicle’s Film Critic Judy Stone.

Guillermo Arriaga is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer already familiar to fans of his films, the Academy Award-nominated 21 Grams, Amores perros, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which won a Palme d'Or for Best Screenplay at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.  Though more famous in the United States for his films, Arriaga is first and foremost a brilliant novelist.  Now he is poised to make his mark on the literary landscape with The Night Buffalo, a new novel and the first of three to be published in the United States. 

Luminous writing characterizes this novel of love and friendship, passion and betrayal, lunacy and mental illness.  The Night Buffalo is set in Mexico City, revolving around the mysterious suicide of Gregorio, a charismatic but troubled young man who was betrayed by the two people he trusted most. 

The beautifully rendered narrative is driven by what is concealed and what is revealed.  The sum leads finally to the truth of how Gregorio ended up "on his mother's lap, stretched out on the back seat of the car his father feverishly drove to the hospital" and the aftermath of his demise. 

Arriaga's insight into human foibles and emotions is apparent in every story he crafts.  His work is both universal in the themes it explores and unique in its style and setting located in his native Mexico.