Guillermo Arriaga Books In Order

A Sweet Scent of Death

From the award winning, internationally acclaimed screenwriter of Amores perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, A Sweet Scent of Death is Guillermo Arriaga’s tale of deception, passion, and violence fused together by the tragic killing of a young girl in a small Mexican village.

Early one morning in a deserted field, Ram n Casta os is confronted with the dead body of Adela, a lovely young girl, whom he had only admired from afar. Within an hour, rumor of the death of Ram n Casta os’s girlfriend has spread to every corner of Loma Grande. This powder trail of gossip ignites further violence when the villagers, thirsty for revenge, cast about for answers and hit upon the nomadic Jos Echeverri Berrioz bal, known as ‘the Gypsy.’ Honor then demands that Ram n must now live out his imaginary past in a brutal reality and prove his manhood by avenging Adela’s cruel fate.

Guillermo Arriaga is the author of The Night Buffalo and The Guillotine Squad. He has worked in television, radio, and film. Arriaga is the award winning screenwriter of Amores perros, 21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Babel.

The Night Buffalo

Award winning, internationally acclaimed writer Guillermo Arriaga weaves a luminous, insightful story of love and friendship, passion and betrayal, lunacy and mental illness. Set in Mexico City, The Night Buffalo revolves around the mysterious suicide of Gregorio, a charismatic but troubled young man who was betrayed by the two people he trusted most.

The Guillotine Squad

Full of Arriaga’s trademark humor and irony present in his films and novels, The Guillotine Squad takes us back to one of the most exciting times in Mexican history. Feliciano Velasco y Borbolla de la Fuente, a lawyer, sells his famous invention, the guillotine, to Pancho Villa, the renowned insurgent general of the Mexican Revolution. Soon Feliciano finds himself immersed in the logic of this simultaneously bizarre, heroic, and cruel world of Villa’s troops.

Amores Perros

Arriaga’s screenplay is an emotional story of lives that collide in a Mexico City car crash. Octavio the teenage owner of Cofi the dog, enters Cofi into fighting contests, hoping to win enough money to elope with Susana. A near fatal injury to Cofi leads to a reckless car chase that ends violently.

21 Grams

The anxiously anticipated new film from the Academy Award nominated makers of Amores PerrosThe fates of three strangers collide when Tony Benicio Del Toro, an ex convict and born again Christian, accidentally kills a man and his two daughters. As Tony struggles to reconcile his fear of jail with a tenuous faith, the widowed Christina Naomi Watts descends into a dangerous cycle of grief, rage, and drug abuse. Paul Sean Penn is a mathematician slowly dying of heart disease, who after receiving a transplant finds himself healthy but trapped inside a withering marriage. As in the critically acclaimed Amores Perros with whose director Arriaga is once again paired the unique and individual obsessions of each character become helplessly intertwined while the story moves toward an inevitable conclusion ripe with revenge and redemption. In addition to the script, this volume fully documents the production of the film via extensive original interviews with the filmmakers and numerous photographs.