class. Between 1961 and 1964 Ibargüengoitia wrote reviews of theatre plays for Revista de la Universidad (University's Magazine). His reviews were often controversial, as he was not afraid to write negative reviews on playwrights who were considered untouchable. His negative reviews of two plays by Alfonso Reyes caused such controversy among the Mexican literary circles that Ibargüengoitia decided to leave the job. In 1962 he wrote his last play, El atentado, with which he won the Casa de las Américas Prize. Novels During the 1950's, Ibargüengoitia started to read about the Mexican Revolution, particularly the autobiographies of many of the main people that took part in it. While he was doing research for El atentado, Ibargüengoitia got the idea to write a novel about the Mexican Revolution; this is how he came up with Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964), a fictional story based on the last phase of the revolution and the forming of the political groups that would dominate Mexican politics for most of the twentieth century. The novel won the Casa de las Américas Prize, and in it, the style that would characterise most of his further work was already present: taking real-life stories and subjecting them to a whimsical, sardonic treatment. His next book, La ley de Herodes (1967), is a collection of short stories, most of which are clearly based on details from his own life. He describes, among many other events, the misadventures of getting a mortgage in Mexico and his experiences at Columbia University's International House. Like his novels, these stories combine farce, sexual peccadilloes, and humor. Maten al león (1969), although set on an imaginary island, is a novel mirroring the Latin American dictatorships; its details are comic but the end is dark. Estas ruinas que ves (1975) is a farce based on realistic details of academic life that are still visible in early 21st century Guanajuato: the clanging of church bells disconcerting a speaker, cutting the ribbon at museum openings, the set of cultural movers and shakers who have known each other since kindergarten. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina and María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Dos crímenes (1979) is a novel about a man who is being prosecuted by the police and runs away to hide in his rich uncle's house,