Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels, including The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Terra Nostra, and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor.

Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia. He died in Mexico City in 2012.

"When you finish, you . . . have gone through a total experience, a beautiful horror story, a horrifying story of beauty, a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen, translated so agilely by Lysander Kemp that it seems to have been written in English." --Newsweek

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pub date: 1986-09-01

Length: 160 pages