books in order

Carlos Fuentes Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Where the Air is Clear (1958)
  2. The Good Conscience (1959)
  3. Aura (1962)
  4. The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962)
  5. A Change of Skin (1967)
  6. Terra Nostra (1975)
  7. The Hydra Head (1978)
  8. Distant Relations (1980)
  9. The Old Gringo (1985)
  10. Christopher Unborn (1986)
  11. The Campaign (1991)
  12. The Orange Tree (1993)
  13. Diana (1994)
  14. The Crystal Frontier (1995)
  15. The Years with Laura Diaz (1999)
  16. Inez (2000)
  17. The Eagle’s Throne (2002)
  18. Vlad (2004)
  19. Happy Families (2006)
  20. Destiny and Desire (2008)
  21. Adam in Eden (2009)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Burnt Water (1981)
  2. Myself with Others (1988)
  3. Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins (1989)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Juan Rulfo’s Mexico (With: ,Margo Glantz,Jorge Alberto Lozoya,Eduardo Rivero,Víctor Jiménez,E. Billeter) (1984)
  2. The Buried Mirror (1992)
  3. A New Time for Mexico (1994)
  4. Voluptuario (1996)
  5. Territories of Time (2003)
  6. This I Believe (2004)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Magical Realist Fiction (1984)
  2. The Picador Book of Latin American Stories (1999)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Carlos Fuentes Books Overview

Where the Air is Clear

Where the Air is Clear, Carlos Fuentes’s first novel, is an unsparing portrayal of Mexico City’s upper class. Departing from a traditional linear narrative, Fuentes constructs his novel around a series of encounters with members of this world, including Federico Robles, an ambitious self made millionaire; Rodrigo Pola, a writer whose father was executed in the Mexican Revolution; and Norma Larragoiti, a social climber striving to erase her humble past. At the center of these events is Ixca Cienfuegos, and enigmatic figure who views the dramas enacted around him with unusual clarity, and who, with the aid of an Indian priestess, plots the destruction of the group. Overlaying Mexican myths onto comtemporary settings, Fuentes shows that even the rich and powerful must succumb to the indomitable spirit of Mexico, which undermines all institutions and shapes all destinies.

The Good Conscience

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 are inconsistent with his professed beliefs. Jaime’s struggle to emerge as a man with a ‘good conscience’ forms the theme of the book: can a rebel correct the evils of an established system and at the same time retain the integrity of his principles?

Aura

Since its publication in 1962, Carlos Fuentes’ novel, Aura, remains not merely an object of academic interest but a continuous source of controversy in Mexico. It was the explosive combination of sex and religion that incensed the Ministro de Hacienda, Salvador Abascal, and linked Aura to the recent polemical Mexican film El Crimen del Padre Amaro. Aura is preoccupied with the place and persistence of the sacred in modern Mexico rather than simply the secret abuses of institutional Catholicism. This critical edition of the work is accompanied by an introduction and notes on the text.

The Death of Artemio Cruz

Hailed as a masterpiece since its publication in 1962, The Death of Artemio Cruz is Carlos Fuentes’s haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico. Its acknowledged place in Latin American fiction and its appeal to a fresh generation of readers have warranted this new translation by Alfred Mac Adam, translator with the author of Fuentes’s Christopher Unborn. As in all his fiction, but perhaps most powerfully in this book, Fuentes is a passionate guide to the ironies of Mexican history, the burden of its past, and the anguish of its present.

Terra Nostra

‘Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.’ Milan KunderaOne of the great masterpieces of modern Latin American fiction, Terra Nostra is concerned with nothing less than the history of Spain and of South America, with the Indian Gods and with Christianity, with the birth, the passion, and the death of civilizations. Fuentes skillfully blends a wide range of literary forms, stories within stories, Mexican and Spanish myth, and famous literary characters in this novel that is both a historical epic and an apocalyptic vision of modern times. Terra Nostra is that most ambitious and rare of creations a total work of art.

Distant Relations

Distant Relations begins in the elegant Automobile club de France as an elderly Count tells a story to the unnamed narrator. But the book does not remain here in the cafe, nor even in France. Instead, as the Count speaks, the story moves across time and space, from Latin America to Europe, from generation to generation. We hear of Hugo, a noted Mexican archeologist, and of his young son, Victor, who were once the Count’s houseguests. He tells of their time in France, of their complicated pasts and their uncertain relationships. This is a story of lost memory and failed promises, one about the past’s unbending influence on the present. Distant Relations is an ambitious novel whose tale of confused familial relations explodes into one about the conflict between the Old World and the New.

The Old Gringo

One of Carlos Fuentes’s greatest works, The Old Gringo tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, and journalist, and of his last mysterious days in Mexico living among Pancho Villa’s soldiers, particularly his encounter with General Tomas Arroyo. In the end, the incompatibility of the two countries or, paradoxically, their intimacy claims both men, in a novel that is, most of all, about the tragic history of two cultures in conflict.

Christopher Unborn

Conceived exactly nine months before the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, the narrator of Christopher Unborn spends the novel waiting to be born. But what kind of world will he be delivered into? ‘Makesicko City,’ as the punning narrator calls it, is not doing well in this alternate, worst case scenario 1992. Politicians are selling pieces of their country to the United States. A black, acid rain falls relentlessly, forewarning of the even worse ecological catastrophes to come. Gangs of children, confined to the slums, terrorize their wealthy neighbors. A great novel of ideas and a work of aesthetic boldness, Christopher Unborn is a unique, and quite funny, work from one of the twentieth century’s most respected authors.

The Campaign

In this witty and enthralling saga of revolutionary South America, Carlos Fuentes explores the period of profound upheaval he calls’ the romantic time.’ His hero, Baltasar Bustos, the son of a wealthy landowner, kidnaps the baby of a prominent judge, replacing it with the black baby of a prostitute. When he catches sight of the baby’s mother, though, he falls instatnly in love with her and sets off on an anguished journey to repent his act and win her love.

The Orange Tree

In the five novellas that comprise this text, the author continues the reconstruction of past and present history he started in ‘Terra Nostra’ and ‘The Campaign’.

Diana

They met for the first time at a party in Mexico, just as the sixties gave way to the seventies: the androgynous, blond capped movie actor Diana Soren, and the renowned writer. For two months they live in a perfect world, until Diana becomes a slave to irrational manias and nocturnal frights.

The Crystal Frontier

The nine stories comprising this brilliant new work all concern people who have had something to do with the family of one Leonardo Barroso, a powerful oligarch of northern Mexico with manifold connections to the United States. This exuberant fiction contains and alludes to journalism, politics, economics, famous tall tales, and picaresque adventures, all united by the ‘vitality, variety, and narrative force that Fuentes always gives his work’ La Jornada.

The Years with Laura Diaz

In this radiant hope filled new novel, Carlos Fuentes gives us a richly painted portrait of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Laura D az a woman who becomes as much a part of our history as of the Mexican history she observes and helps to create. Filled with brilliantly colored scenes and heartbreaking dramas, the epic story of The Years with Laura D az is also a novel of subtle and penetrating psychological insight. As in Fuentes’s masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and then moves to Mexico City, tracing a migration during the Revolution and, its aftermath that is an important element in Laura D az’s life as well as in Mexico’s history. This extraordinary young woman, born in 1898, grows into a devoted wife and mother, becomes the lover of great men , and, before her death in 1972, is celebrated as a politically committed artist on whom none of the poignant paradoxes of Mexican life been lost. Significantly, her life story comes to us thanks to her Chicano great grandson, inheritor of both her gifts and her paradoxes: the novel opens in Detroit and closes in Los Angeles with him. Laura D az is a complicated and alluring hero*ine whose brave honesty and good heart prevail despite her losing a brother and a grandson to the darkest forces of Mexico’s turbulent, corrupt politics, and a son to the ravages of a disease that consumes him before his greatness can be fulfilled. Yet in the end she is a happy woman, despite the tragedy and loss, for she has borne witness to and helped to affect her country’s life, and she has loved and understood with unflinching honesty. In this most important novel in decades, Carlos Fuentes places the complex world of the twentieth century firmly in the hands of a hero*ine who is sure to become a lasting emblem of Mexico’s and our recent past.

Inez

A magical short novel that weaves together two stories, two couples, two different times, and two grand passionsIn 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 drama of Berlioz’s music for The Damnation of Faust informs the action; in the other, we watch as a slowly emergent love shapes the nature and character of the two protagonists. A beautiful crystal seal the meaning of which is a mystery that obsesses Atlan Ferrara, who owns it unites these two narratives; the magical seal allows one to read unknown languages and hear impossible music, and it is the symbol of a shared love. The duality of Carlos Fuentes’s brilliant new novel mirrors two eras, one in the deepest remote time and one in a time to come, but the passions evoked in both, reflected against each other like two sides of a crystal seal, break the limits of time and space and unite in one story. And, like the light refracted through the seal, it begins in prehistory and spirals out into infinity…
In Inez, we find Carlos Fuentes at the height of his magical and realist powers. This profound and beautiful work confirms his standing as Mexico’s pre eminent novelist.

The Eagle’s Throne

Here is a true literary event the long awaited new novel by Carlos Fuentes, one of the world’s great writers. By turns a tragedy and a farce, an acidic black comedy and an indictment of modern politics, The Eagle s Throne is a seriously entertaining and perceptive story of international intrigue, sexual deception, naked ambition, and treacherous betrayal. In the near future, at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Mexico s idealistic president has dared to vote against the U.S. occupation of Colombia and Washington s refusal to pay OPEC prices for oil. Retaliation is swift. Concocting a glitch in a Florida satellite, America s president cuts Mexico s communications systems no phones, faxes, or e mails and plunges the country into an administrative nightmare of colossal proportions. Now, despite the motto that a Mexican politician never puts anything in writing, people have no choice but to communicate through letters, which Fuentes crafts with a keen understanding of man s motives and desires. As the blizzard of activity grows more and more complex, political adversaries come out to prey. The ineffectual president, his scheming cabinet secretary, a thuggish and ruthless police chief, and an unscrupulous, sensual kingmaker are just a few of the fascinating characters maneuvering and jockeying for position to achieve the power they all so desperately crave. From the Hardcover edition.

Happy Families

The internationally acclaimed author Carlos Fuentes, winner of the Cervantes Prize and the Latin Civilization Award, delivers a stunning work of fiction about family and love across an expanse of Mexican life, reminding us why he has been called a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen Newsweek. In these masterly vignettes, Fuentes explores Tolstoy’s classic observation that Happy Families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In A Family Like Any Other, each member of the Pagan family lives in isolation, despite sharing a tiny house. In The Mariachi s Mother, the limitless devotion of a woman is revealed as she secretly tends to her estranged son s wounds. Sweethearts reunites old lovers unexpectedly and opens up the possibilities for other lives and other loves. These are just a few of the remarkable stories in Happy Families, but they all inhabit Fuentes s trademark Mexico, where modern obsessions bump up against those of the mythic past, and the result is a triumphant display of the many ways we reach out to one another and find salvation through irrepressible acts of love. In this spectacular translation, the acclaimed Edith Grossman captures the full weight of Fuentes s range. Whether writing in the language of the street or in straightforward, elegant prose, Fuentes gives us stories connected by love, including the failure of love between spouses, lovers, parents and children, siblings. From the Mexican presidential palace to the novels of the poor and the vast expanse of humanity in between, Happy Families is a magnificent portrait of modern life in all its complicated beauty, as told by one of the world s most celebrated writers. Praise for Carlos FuentesWinner of the Cervantes PrizeThe Old Gringo A dazzling novel that possesses the weight and resonance of myth and the fierce magic of a remembered dream. The New York TimesThe Death of Artemio Cruz Remarkable in the scope of the human drama it pictures, the corrosive satire and sharp dialogue. The New York Times Book Review The Years with Laura D az Reading this magnificent novel is like standing beneath the dome of the Sistine Chapel…
. The breadth and enormity of this accomplishment is breathtaking. The Denver PostThis I Believe Engaging, offering surprising conclusions, provocations or turns of phrase…
Put down the page turner and dare to drink these full bodied, red, shining words. Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe Eagle s Throne Dazzling, razor sharp…
prescient…
a feast of political insight. The Washington Post Book World

Destiny and Desire

Winner of the Cervantes Prize Carlos Fuentes, one of the world’s most acclaimed authors, is at the height of his powers in this stunning new novel a magnificent epic of passion, magic, and desire in modern Mexico, a rich and remarkable tapestry set in a world where free will fights with the wishes of the gods. Josu Nadal has lost more than his innocence: He has been robbed of his life and his posthumous narration sets the tone for a brilliantly written novel that blends mysticism and realism. Josu tells of his fateful meeting as a skinny, awkward teen with Jeric , the vigorous boy who will become his twin, his best friend, and his shadow. Both orphans, the two young men intend to spend their lives in intellectual pursuit until they enter an adult landscape of sex, crime, and ambition that will test their pledge and alter their lives forever. Idealistic Josu goes to work for a high tech visionary whose stunning assistant will introduce him to a life of desire; cynical Jeric is enlisted by the Mexican president in a scheme to sell happiness to the impoverished mas*ses. On his journey into a web of illegality in which he will be estranged from Jeric , Josu is aided and impeded by a cast of unforgettable characters: a mad, imprisoned murderer with a warning of revenge, an elegant aviatrix and addict seeking to be saved, a prostitute shared by both men who may have murdered her way into a brilliant marriage, and the prophet Ezekiel himself. Mixing ancient mythologies with the sensuousness and avarice and need of the twenty first century, Destiny and Desire is a monumental achievement from one of the masters of contemporary literature.

Myself with Others

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.

Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

Included are five stories, whose plots range from the tale of two young men stealing a mannequin to a bullfighter in the time of Goya and of today.

Juan Rulfo’s Mexico (With: ,Margo Glantz,Jorge Alberto Lozoya,Eduardo Rivero,Víctor Jiménez,E. Billeter)

Juan Rulfo was one of the great literary innovators of the twentieth century. His 1955 novel Pedro P ramo is considered one of the foundational classics of magic realism, predating One Hundred Years of Solitude by more than a decade. Lesser known are his haunting photographs of Mexico, which exhibit remarkable parallels to his prose. The photographs, mainly taken between 1945 and 1955, do not tell stories: they present. The images of people and their land, women in their traditional dress, musicians with their instruments, capture the calm, quiet, inner rhythms of Mexico’s rural population. Rulfo extracts unique moments through his photographs; his images of desolate, abandoned buildings, their walls destroyed by artillery shells, are expressions of his nation’s painful history. His quietly dramatic landscapes recall the work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston while displaying a style that is truly his own. This collection of 175 images is the only comprehensive collection of Juan Rulfo’s photographs available. The six essays preceding the images illuminate the photographs and pay tribute to one of Mexico’s most enduring literary and visual artists.

The Buried Mirror

As the Los Angeles Times said: ‘Drawing expertly on five centuries of the cultural history of Europe and the Americas, Fuentes seeks to capture the spirit of the new, vibrant, and enduring civilization in the New World that began in Spain.’ Fuentes’s singular success in this remarkable endeavor has made the book a classic in its field. A Mariner Reissue.

A New Time for Mexico

Fuentes’s bold and timely study discusses the origins and nature of the tumultuous events that have recently transformed Mexican politics and society. The rebellion in Chiapas, a rash of assassinations, the break between Presidents Salinas and Zedillo, the continual struggle for democratic self rule: These and other developments are addressed by one of Mexico’s wisest, most influential commentators.

This I Believe

In this masterly, deeply personal, and provocative book, the internationally renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, whose work has been called a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen Newsweek, steps back to survey 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, This I Believe takes us on a marvelous inner journey with a great writer. Fuentes ranges wide, from contradictions inherent in Latin American culture and politics to his long friendship with director Luis Bu uel. Along the way, we find reflection 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, caf s, 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, Fuentes captivates with the power of his intellect and his prose. Here, too, are vivid, often heartbreaking glimpses into his personal life. Silvia is a powerful love letter to his beloved wife. In Children, Fuentes recalls the births of his daughters and the tragic death of his son; in Cinema he relives the magic of films such as Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz. Further extending his reach, he examines the collision between history and contemporary life in Civil Society, Left, and Revolution. And he poignantly addresses the experiences we all hold in common as he grapples with beauty, death, freedom, God, and sex. By turns provocative and intimate, partisan and universal, this book is a brilliant summation of an international literary career. Revisiting the influences, commitments, readings, and insights of a lifetime, Fuentes has fashioned a magnificently coherent statement of his view of the world, reminding us once again why reading Fuentes is like standing beneath the dome of the Sistine Chapel…
. The breadth and enormity of this accomplishment is breathtaking The Denver Post. From the Hardcover edition.

Magical Realist Fiction

This capacious 520 pages anthology has selections from the authors you would expect to find, from others you may be less familiar with, and from writers you might not expect to show up in this company. The result is a treasure trove of unusual fiction spanning authors from Gogol and Kafka through Woolf and Nabokov to Calvino, Garcia Marquez, and Barthelme one of the most exciting anthologies to appear in the last decade. This is a poet’s companion, a student’s delight, great bedside reading: the kind of book you’d take to a desert island!

The Picador Book of Latin American Stories

This collection of stories from Latin America features such authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The tales cover a multitude of lives, and tell of unrequited love and conmen, humour and magic.

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