The former Mexican Ambassador to France, Carlos Fuentes is the author of more than 20 books, including Happy Families, The Eagle’s Throne, The Death of Artemio Cruz, and The Old Gringo. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Prize in Literature (Mexico’s highest literary award), France’s Legion of Honor medal, and the Miguel de Cervantes Prize—the premier literary prize in the Spanish speaking world. His new novel, Destiny and Desire is the posthumously told taleof two orphan boys whose intense intellectual friendship collides with the fantastical political and economic landscape of Mexico’s history and future.

Edith Grossman is the distinguished translator of works by major Spanish-language authors, including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, and Alvaro Mutis, as well as Carlos Fuentes. She has won numerous awards for her work, notably the 2006 PEN Ralph Manheim Medal, and her translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote was published to great acclaim in 2003. Of her new book, Why Translation Matters, critic Harold Bloom writes, “Edith Grossman, the Glenn Gould of translators, has written a superb book on the art of the literary translation… this should become a classic text.”