Mexican literature series

"One of the late Carlos Fuentes's final projects, this compendium of his criticism traces the evolution of the Latin American novel from the discovery of America to the present day. Combining historical perspective with personal and often opinionated interpretation, Fuentes gives us a tour from Machado de Assis to Borges and beyond. A landmark analysis, as well as a scintillating and often wry commentary on a great author's peers and influences, this book is as much a contribution to Latin American literature as it is a chronicle of that literature's greatest achievements" --

A respected Mexican businessman finds his idyllic life crumbling in the face of his wife's infidelity with a corrupt director of national security, his brother-in-law's worship of a child preacher, and his mistress' break with reality.

"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 nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, permitted to revisit earth once a year for twenty-four hours in an enactment of his theory of eternal return. With tenderness and gallows humor, the novelist and the philosopher tell the story of the beginning of the revolution, its triumph, fanaticism, terror, and eventual unraveling. Nietzsche on His Balcony is a story of love, commitment, passion, betrayal, and hope."--Page 4 of cover.