Author, diplomat, editor, political writer, and essayist, Carlos Fuentes wears all these hats in his works which blend realism, fantasy, social protest, psychological insight, and history. Books such as Where the Air Is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, and The Years with Laura Diaz have survived translation and transplantation of cultures to reach a worldwide readership, elevating Fuentes to the top of the list of Mexican writers. "Carlos Fuentes," stated Robert Maurer in Saturday Review, is "without doubt one of Mexico's two or three greatest novelists." He is part of a group of Latin American writers whose writings, according to Alistair Reid's New Yorker essay, "formed the background of the Boom," a literary phenomenon Reid described as a period in the 1960s when "a sudden surge of hitherto unheard-of writers from Latin America began to be felt among [U.S.] readers." Fuentes...