The nine stories comprising this brilliant new work of fiction from Carlos Fuentes all concern people who in one way or another have had something to do with, or still are part of, the family of one Leonardo Barroso, a powerful oligarch of northern Mexico with manifold connections to the United States. Each story concerns an encounter — sometimes hilarious, often tragic, frequently ambivalent, inevitably poignant — that in its own dramatic way epitomizes some striking contrast along the invisible, reflective, dangerous frontier that divides the North American world.Yet beyond the emblematic power of Fuentes's fiction to make us think about the political and cultural themes defining that world, there is the sheer human diversity of life on the "crystal frontier": these extraordinary stories pulse with vivid experience — of love in its many guises, of loneliness, of youth and old age, of heartbreak and redemption. Like many of the greatest Spanish-language novels, this exuberant fiction contains and alludes to journalism, politics, economics, famous tall tales, and picaresque adventures, all united by the "vitality, variety, and narrative force that Fuentes always gives his work" (La Jornada).