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The Scandal of the Century: And Other Writings
Current price:
$27.95
Publication Date: May 14th, 2019
Publisher:
Knopf
ISBN:
9780525656425
Pages:
336
Description
“The articles and columns in The Scandal of the Century demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start . . . He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding . . . He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe.” --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
From one of the titans of twentieth-century literature, collected here for the first time: a selection of his journalism from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s--work that he considered even more important to his legacy than his universally acclaimed works of fiction.
"I don't want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism," Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career--years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982. Here are the first pieces he wrote while working for newspapers in the coastal Colombian cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla . . . his longer, more fictionlike reportage from Paris and Rome . . . his monthly columns for Spain's El País. And while all the work points in style, wit, depth, and passion to his fiction, these fifty pieces are, more than anything, a revelation of the writer working at the profession he believed to be "the best in the world."
Praise for The Scandal of the Century: And Other Writings
"García Márquez always thought of himself as a journalist first and foremost and this brilliant collection goes a long way towards justifying that belief. Or, at least, it puts his journalism on the same level as his fiction, which is quite some level.”
--Salman Rushdie
'The good news, hardly surprising, is that this collection is a Master Class on how to write for a newspaper: lush, vivid columns full of information, irony, whimsy, humor, skepticism and rumination, just what one would expect from Márquez. The bad news is that he checked out so early, and that his genius is not around to tell us what we need to know about Donald Trump."
--Seymour M. Hersh
“Gabriel García Márquez’ fiction would not exist without his journalism, just as without his fiction his journalism would not exist: they nourished each other. Some of García Márquez’s journalistic pieces are every bit as good as his fiction at its best.”
--Javier Cercas, author of Soldiers of Salamine
“The articles and columns in The Scandal of the Century demonstrate that his forthright, lightly ironical voice just seemed to be there, right from the start. . . . He’s among those rare great fiction writers whose ancillary work is almost always worth finding. . . . He had a way of connecting the souls in all his writing, fiction and nonfiction, to the melancholy static of the universe.” --Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"In his journalism, García Márquez’s prose was as precise, euphonious and inventive as it was in his fiction. Only a magician of a translator like Anne McLean could get it right. For anyone who has been enthralled by One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Scandal of the Century is an essential book."
--Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling
"This book brings us García Márquez the muckraker, well grounded in reality. In a time of “fake news”, this is an indispensable book to understand what a real reporter is."
--Jorge Ramos, author of Stranger