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"I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or the Nobel Prize, but for the newspaper. I was born a journalist, and today I feel more like a reporter than ever. It's in my blood; it draws me in."
Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most important and influential figures in world literature and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, made it clear in his final years that journalism had always been his greatest and most enduring passion. Besides being a novelist, he was a short story writer, essayist, film critic, screenwriter, and, above all, an intellectual committed to the great issues of our time—especially those affecting his beloved Colombia and Hispanic America in general. A leading figure of so-called magical realism, in which history and imagination weave a living literature that breathes through every pore, Gabo, as he was known, was definitively the creator of one of the most meaningful narrative universes that the Spanish language offered us in the 20th century.
The Scandal of the Century is the most representative example of the narrative tension—between journalism and literature—that permeated García Márquez's entire career as a reporter. Spanning four decades, this delightful journey through fifty texts shows how "the best craft in the world" is at the heart of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner's work.
With a selection of texts by Cristóbal Pera and a foreword by Jon Lee Anderson, this anthology contains indispensable texts, ranging from reports written in Rome about the death of a young Italian woman—an event that enabled the author to paint an incomparable fresco of Italy's political and artistic elites—to chronicles on the trafficking of women from Paris to Latin America, and notes on Fidel Castro and John Paul II. This collection also includes early fragments, in which Aracataca and the Buendía family appear for the first time, alongside articles that examine politics, society, and culture through the solid, profound, and experienced lens of this great storyteller.
The Scandal of the Century features fifty texts by García Márquez, published in newspapers and magazines between 1950 and 1984. Selected from his monumental five-volume Journalism , the works contained here provide readers of the author's fiction with a glimpse into his work in the press, the fruit of the craft he always considered the foundation of his work. In all these texts, we detect a distinctive voice and a unique narrative that have captivated countless people around the world.
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