Carlos Fuentes

The Good Conscience is Carlos Fuentes's second novel. The scene is Guanajuato, a provincial capital in Central Mexico, once one of the world's richest mining centers. The Ceballos family has been reinstated to power, and adolescent Jaime Ceballos, its only heir, is torn between the practical reality of his family's life and the idealism of his youth and his Catholic education. His father is a good man but weak; his uncle is powerful, yet his actions...

"Vlad" is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic cruelty was an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this sly sequel, Vlad really is undead: dispossessed after centuries of mayhem by Eastern European wars and rampant blood shortages. More than a postmodern riff on "the vampire craze," Vlad is also an anatomy of the Mexican bourgeoisie, as well as our culture's ways of dealing with death. For-as in Dracula-Vlad has need of both a lawyer and...

The life and fate of Laura Díaz becomes entwined in the history, culture, and politics of Mexico, in a novel that chronicles her life from 1905 to 1978 as she becomes a politically active artist, wife, mother, and lover.

This inspired novel, Christopher Unborn, is narrated by the as yet unborn first child to be born on October 12, 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America; his conception and birth bracket the novel. A playfully savage masterpiece by Carlos Fuentes.

In the five novellas that comprise The Orange Tree, Carlos Fuentes continues the passionate and imaginative reconstruction of past and present history that has distinguished Terra Nostra and The Campaign. From the story of Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean, to the fate of Hernan Cortes's two sons, to the destruction of the Spanish city of Numantia by the Romans and the annihilation of Hollywood by Acapulco, Fuentues couples the epic grandeur of...

The nine stories comprising The Crystal Frontier, a brilliant work of fiction from Carlos Fuentes, all concern people who in one way or another have had something to do with, or still are part of, the family of one Leonardo Barroso, a powerful oligarch of northern Mexico with manifold connections to the United States.

A magical short novel that weaves together two stories, two couples, two different times, and two grand passions In one of the narratives that comprise this superb new novel from Carlos Fuentes, we are introduced to Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a fabled orchestral conductor, and his great love Inez Prada, a renowned singer. In the other, Fuentes memorably delineates the very first encounter in human history between a man and a woman. In one, the intense...

In Burnt Water by Carlos Fuentes, the rich and the poor, the noble and the brutish, and street kids and aesthetes find themselves portrayed in twelve short stories examining the life of Mexico City.

In Myself with Others, Fuentes has assembled essays reflecting three of the great elements of his work: autobiography, love of literature, and politics. They include his reflections on his beginning as a writer, his celebrated Harvard University commencement address, and his trenchant examinations of Cervantes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Borges.

Renowned as a novelist of unsurpassed invention, Carlos Fuentes here presents his second collection of stories to appear in English. Where his first, Burnt Water, published in 1980, had as its underlying theme Mexico City itself, Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins extends its imaginative boundaries out to Savannah, to Cadiz, to Glasgow, to Seville and Madrid, both past and present. This new collection is more mysterious, more magical, too, than...