Published in its entirety, Frida Kahlo's amazing illustrated journal documents the last ten years of her turbulent life. These passionate, often surprising, intimate records, kept under lock and key for some 40 years in Mexico, reveal many new dimensions in the complex personal life of this remarkable Mexican artist. The 170-page journal contains the artist's thoughts, poems, and dreams-many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera-along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations. The text entries, written in Frida's round, full script in brightly colored inks, make the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Her writing reveals the artist's political sensibilities, recollections of her childhood, and her enormous courage in the face of more than 35 operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of 18. This intimate portal into her life is sure to fascinate fans of the artist, art historians, and women's culturalists alike.

Mariano Azuela, the first of the novelists of the Revolution, was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1873. He studied medicine in Guadalajara and returned to Lagos in 1909, where he began the practice of his profession. He began his writing career early; in 1896 he published Impressions of a Student in a weekly of Mexico City. This was followed by numerous sketches and short stories, and in 1911 by his first novel, Andres Perez, maderista. Like most of the young Liberals, he supported Francisco I. Madero's uprising, which overthrew the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, and in 1911 was made Director of Education of the State of Jalisco. After Madero's assassination, he joined the army of Pancho Villa as doctor, and his knowledge of the Revolution was acquired at firsthand. When the counterrevolutio-nary forces of Victoriano Huerta were temporarily triumphant, he emigrated to El Paso, Texas, where in 1915 he wrote The Underdogs (Los de abajo), which did not receive general recognition until 1924, when it was hailed as the novel of the Revolution.

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.

As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. Perhaps Fuentes's masterpiece, "The Death of Artemio Cruz "is a haunting voyage into the soul of modern Mexico.

Carlos Fuentes, born in Panama in 1928, has received many awards for his accomplishments as a novelist, essayist, and commentator, among them the Cervantes Prize. He is the author of more than twenty books, including "The Old Gringo "and "The Eagle's Throne. "He divides his time between Mexico City and London. Hailed as a masterpiece upon its original 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 MacAdam.
As the novel opens, Artemio Cruz, the all-powerful newspaper magnate and land baron, lies confined to his bed and, in dreamlike flashes, recalls the pivotal episodes of his life. Carlos Fuentes manipulates the ensuing kaleidoscope of images with dazzling inventiveness, layering memory upon memory, from Cruz's heroic campaigns during the Mexican Revolution, through his relentless climb from poverty to wealth, to his uneasy death. 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. "This is more than a retranslation of a masterpiece. It amounts to a restoration: here is the magnificent book that Fuentes wrote originally, superbly rendered by Alfred Mac Adam into an English version that precisely meshes with Fuentes's Spanish."--Douglas Day "This is more than a retranslation of a masterpiece. It amounts to a restoration: here is the magnificent book that Fuentes wrote originally, superbly rendered by Alfred Mac Adam into an English version that precisely meshes with Fuentes's Spanish."--Douglas Day
"Remarkable, in the scope of the human drama it pictures, the corrosive satire and sharp dialogue."--Mildred Adams, "The New York Times Book Review
""Carlos Fuentes is perhaps the only living Latin-American writer who has it in him to do for his country what Euclides da Cunha did for Brazil in "Os Sertoes," and to make the passion of the land's rebirth and repossession comprehensible to the outsider."--Anthony West, "The New Yorker
""First translated into English more than a quarter-century ago, Fuentes's acclaimed novel about modern Mexico has since gone through nearly 30 printings. Despite its popularity, the original English version often was unclear, obscuring Fuentes's language and intent. MacAdam's meticulous new rendering gives the English-reading public a fresh slant on the fictional Cruz, a newspaper owner and land baron. The novel opens with Cruz on his deathbed, and plunges us into his thoughts as he segues from the past to his increasingly disoriented present. Drawn as a tragic figure, Cruz fights bravely during the Mexican Revolution but in the process loses his idealism--and the only woman who ever loved him. He marries the daughter of a hacienda owner and, in the opportunistic, postwar climate, he uses her family connections and money to amass an ever-larger fortune. Cocky, audacious, corrupt, Cruz, on another level, represents the paradoxes of recent Mexican history. Written before Fuentes's masterpieces "A Change of Skin" and "Terra Nostra," this novel, with its freewheeling experimental prose and psychological exploration, anticipates many of the author's later themes."--"Publishers Weekly"

Felipe Montero is employed in the house of an aged widow to edit her deceased husband's memoirs. There Felipe meets her beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. his passion for Aura and his gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

On a hot, insomniac night at the Hotel Metropol, the novelist Carlos Fuentes steps onto his balcony only to find another man on the balcony next door. The other man asks for news of the social strife turning into revolution in the unnamed city below them. He reveals himself as the 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, permitted to revisit earth once a year for 24 hours based on his theory of eternal return. With tenderness and gallows humor, the novelist and the philosopher unflinchingly tell the story of the beginning of the revolution, its triumph, fanaticism, terror, and retrenchment: a story of love, friendship, family, commitment, passion, corruption, betrayal, violence, and hope.

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.

What Fleur Cowles brings to her warm and wide-armed book is a sense of generosity, and embraceable quality that is uniquely hers. "Fleur Cowles sits you down beside her far-flung friends--royal and regular--and provides delicious moments that are the sidebars of history."--Liz Carpenter.

These poems by Carlos Fuentes Lemus (1973-1999), son of the author of Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn, are an introduction to the unique voice of a sensitive but unsentimental young poet who became aware of his mortality at a very early age. A hemophiliac who as a child contracted HIV from contaminated blood products, he struggled to come to terms with his condition through the practice of art while paying homage to those artists from the Western canon (and from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) whose work inspired and shaped his own, such as Keats, Van Gogh, Wilde, Rimbaud, Schiele, Kerouac, Elvis, Hendrix, and Dylan. 4:56's heartbreaking "songs and visions" record his fleeting passage through our world.From the Afterword by Juan Goytisolo: "Beautiful, startling lines, without the least self-complacency, imbued with a hidden and unsettling pain. I have always been enchanted by the magic of English poetry, and its ability to express more in fewer words than can other languages that I know. Carlos Fuentes Lemus moved within its sphere almost on tiptoe, oblivious to any rhetoric and easy sentimentalism, with the delicacy and weightlessness with which he fleetingly traced his path through life."

Two narratives twine through this superb novel: one introduces Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a fabled orchestral conductor, and his great passion, Inez Prada, a red-haired Mexican diva; the other is a mysterious telling of the first encounter in human history between a man and a woman. Berlioz's music for"The Damnation of Faust"brings Gabriel and Inez together, while the emerging love of neh-el and ah-nel--the original lovers--echoes the Faustian pact of love and death. Linking these narratives is a beautiful crystal seal that belongs to Atlan-Ferrara, its meaning an enigma that obsesses him. And like the light refracted through the seal, these stories begin in prehistory and spiral 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 one of the world's pre-eminent novelist.

A radiant family saga set in a century of Mexican history, by one of the world's greatest writers.
Carlos Fuentes's hope-filled new novel sees the twentieth century 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. Born in 1898, this extraordinary woman grows into a wife and mother, becomes the lover of great men, and, before her death in 1972, is celebrated as a politically committed artist. A complicated and alluring heroine, she lives a happy life despite the tragedies and losses she experiences, for she has borne witness to great changes in her country's life, and she has loved and understood with unflinching honesty.
In his most important novel in decades, Carlos Fuentes has created a world filled with brilliantly colored scenes and heartbreaking dramas. The result is a novel of subtle, penetrating insight and immense power.

Novela de gran intensidad tematica, esta centrada en la reflexion sobre el Mexico surgido de la Revolucion, pero tambien analiza, con amargura, cuestiones tan universales y permanentes como la soledad, el poder o el desamor.

Carlos Fuentes's new novel concerns people, rich and poor, who all have something to do with the family of one Leonardo Barroso, a powerful business tycoon of Northern Mexico who successfully exploits his connections to the United States. Barroso controls the fate of strangers as well as family members, and his decisions -- whether to marry his son to his goddaughter and future mistress, whether to sponsor a young gay medical student for his studies at Cornell, or whether to fly weekend janitors to New York City to avoid American labor costs -- carry long-term effects for anyone within his web. Fuentes mingles generations and classes in this memorable novel, vividly illuminating the cultural conflict that rages between Mexico and America. In extraordinary prose, in the experience of love, of loneliness, of heartbreak and redemption, the dramas that ensue epitomize the strange, invisible, dangerous frontier that divides us.

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.

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?

Fuentes' 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.