Carlos Fuentes - Novels, Stories & Non-fiction (27 books)

CARLOS FUENTES (1928-2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. One of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world, Fuentes was a catalyst, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortázar, of the explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s-1970s, known as El Boom. He wrote plays, short stories, political nonfiction and novels, many of them chronicles of tangled love. His many literary honors included the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.

Fuentes's first novel, WHERE THE AIR IS CLEAR (1958), describes life in Mexico City in the 1940s and 50s, with its heady mixture of Spanish, indigenous and more contemporary Mexican elements. The linguistic and formal experimentation in the book brought him to the attention of reviewers in Mexico and abroad, but it was his second novel, THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ (1962) that won him recognition as one of Latin America's leading young authors. The book centres on the Mexican revolution (1910-20) and its effect on succeeding generations. It is still considered by many to be Fuentes's masterpiece because of its psychological insights, again with formal experimentation.

Other major novels from this period were A CHANGE OF SKIN (1967) and the 350,000-word, all-encompassing TERRA NOSTRA (1975), which spans more than 2,000 years of history and has been called "a panoramic Hispano-American creation myth." In his 60s and 70s, Fuentes produced a stream of novels and essays that deepened his investigation into the possibilities of fiction, in works such as THE CRYSTAL FRONTIER (1997), THE YEARS WITH LAURA DÍAZ (1999), and INEZ (2003). Some of these were less well received than his earlier work, but THE EAGLE'S THRONE (2003), an epistolary novel comically taking apart the complexities and absurdities of Mexican political life, was seen by many critics as a return to form.

His novels remained ambitious and topical to the end. His last, DESTINY AND DESIRE (2011), is a sprawling work that Michael Wood described as "not exactly a parody of War and Peace, but certainly a spectral, playful revision of the idea of a novel that competes with history."

Among the non-fiction included here, MYSELF WITH OTHERS (1988) assembles 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. THE BURIED MIRROR (1992) is a fascinating and richly illustrated journey through five hundred years of Spanish and Latin American history.

In THIS I BELIEVE (2005), Fuentes surveys the wellsprings of art and ideology, the events that have shaped our time, and his extraordinary life and fiercest passions. Arranged alphabetically from "Amore" to "Zurich," Fuentes ranges wide, from contradictions inherent in Latin American culture and politics to his long friendship with director Luis Buñuel; reflections on the mixed curse and blessing of globalization; memories of a sexual initiation in Zurich; a fond tracing of a family tree heavy with poets, dreamers, and diplomats; evocations of the streets, cafés, and bedrooms of Washington, Paris, Santiago de Chile, Cambridge, Oaxaca, and New York; and a celebration of literary heroes including Balzac, Cervantes, Faulkner, Kafka, and Shakespeare.

Throughout his life, wherever he lived, Mexico was the centre of Fuentes's artistic preoccupations. In his late 70s, he provided a typically graphic description of the attraction he felt for his own land: "It's a very enigmatic country, and that's a good thing because it keeps us alert, makes us constantly try to decipher the enigma of Mexico, the mystery of Mexico, to understand a country that is very, very baroque, very complicated and full of surprises."


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise indicated:

Novels

* ADAM IN EDEN (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Translated by E. Swaskan Bumas and Alejandro Branger.

* AURA (FSG, 2013). Translated by Lysander Kemp.

* THE CAMPAIGN (FSG, 1991). Translated by Alfred MacAdam.

* A CHANGE OF SKIN (FSG, 1968). Translated by Sam Hileman. -- ePUB + PDF

* CHRISTOPHER UNBORN (FSG, 1989). Translated by Alfred MacAdam and the Author.

* THE CRYSTAL FRONTIER: A Novel in Nine Stories (Bloomsbury, 1998). Translated by Alfred MacAdam.

* THE DEATH OF ARTEMIO CRUZ (FSG, 1991). Translated by Alfred MacAdam. -- ePUB + PDF

* DESTINY AND DESIRE (Random House, 2011). Translated by Edith Grossman.

* DIANA: The Goddess Who Hunts Alone (FSG, 1995). Translated by Alfred MacAdam.

* DISTANT RELATIONS (FSG, 1982). Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.

* THE EAGLE'S THRONE (Random House, 2006). Translated by Kristina Cordero.

* THE GOOD CONSCIENCE (FSG, 1968). Translated by Sam Hileman.

* THE HYDRA HEAD (FSG, 1979). Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.

* INEZ (FSG, 2002). Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.

* THE OLD GRINGO (FSG, 1985). Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and the Author.

* THE ORANGE TREE (FSG, 1994). Translated by Alfred MacAdam.

* TERRA NOSTRA (FSG, 1983 / Dalkey Archive, 2005). Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden with an Afterword by Milan Kundera. -- ePUB + PDF

* VLAD (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Translated by E. Shaskan Bumas and Alejandro Branger.

* WHERE THE AIR IS CLEAR (FSG, 1971). Translated by Sam Hileman. -- PDF

* THE YEARS WITH LAURA DIAZ (FSG, 2000). Translated by Alfred MacAdam.


Short Stories

* BURNT WATER: Stories (FSG, 1980). Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden.

* CONSTANCIA & OTHER STORIES FOR VIRGINS (FSG, 1990). Translated by Thomas Christensen.

* HAPPY FAMILIES: Stories (Random House, 2008). Translated by Edith Grossman.


Non-fiction

* THE BURIED MIRROR: Reflections on Spain and the New World (Houghton Mifflin, 1992). -- PDF

* LATIN AMERICA: At War With the Past (Anansi, 2001).

* MYSELF WITH OTHERS: Selected Essays (FSG, 1990).

* THIS I BELIEVE: An A-to-Z of a Life (Random House, 2005). Translated by Kristina Cordero.