Ribeyro, Peru's master storyteller, is the author of novels, plays, literary criticism, and eight volumes of short stories. He is part of a group of short story writers, the so-called "generation of the fifties", who explored Lima's urban reality by means of naturalistic techniques. Ribeyro's works have been compared by literary critic Jose Miguel Oviedo with the classic narrative writers of the past century: Stendhal, Maupassant, Flaubert, Chekhov, and Gogol.