Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez

<p>Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1927) is a sophisticated literary artist with broad popularity. His masterpiece <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em> has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. In 1982 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.</p><p><em>Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez</em> starts with the years of his early phenomenal success and continues through his most recent turn-of-the-century exchanges. He speaks of his impoverished childhood his life as an indifferent student his apprenticeship as a journalist the inspiration that led to the writing of his most renowned novel the difficulties brought by fame and his leftist opinions. Works such as <em>The Autumn of the Patriarch</em> <em>Love in the Time of Cholera</em> <em>The General in His Labyrinth</em> and <em>News of a Kidnapping</em> are discussed in detail.</p><p>When interviewed by Hispanic journalists García Márquez chats spontaneously and frankly about all sorts of topics including himself. Those conversations translated into English for the first time offer a fascinating glimpse of the Colombian genius at his most down-to-earth informal and relaxed. Taken together with seminal pieces from the <em>Atlantic Monthly</em> the <em>New York Times Book Review</em> and other English-language periodicals <em>Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez</em> offers a nuanced multi-faceted view of one of contemporary literature's greatest masters.</p><p>Gene H. Bell-Villada of Williamstown Massachusetts is chair of the Department of Romance Languages at Williams College and the author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist <em>Art for Art's Sake & Literary Life: How Politics & Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism 1790-1990</em> and <em>Overseas American: Growing Up Gringo in the Tropics</em> (University Press of Mississippi).</p>