With the 1975 publication of his novel, The Road to Tamazunchale (republished in 1978), Ron Arias joined the short list of major Chicano writers in the twentieth century. The book has attracted critical praise, including the top award in the 1975 University of California, Irvine, Chicano literary competition and a National Book Award nomination. Like his literary icon, Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, whose international eminence rests primarily on his masterpiece, Pedro Páramo (1955), Arias is not a prolific writer. He is a post-modernist who integrates in his fiction a keen eye for actual Mexican-American experience. His literary style has been influenced by popular Latin American writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. He is concerned with chronicling the urban Chicano experience in all its bittersweet contradictions, and his major themes are the struggle between imagination and rationalism and the transcendent possibilities of ethnic pluralism. His themes reveal Arias...