Every published story written by the Colombian literary master Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be sold in a single volume, in Spanish, for the first time in Latin America on Friday.
“All Stories” compiles the Nobel Prize winner’s 41 tales penned over the last half-century.
The earliest stories, published in 1955’s “Leaf Storm, and Other Stories,” include “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo” – when Marquez first described the fictional town that would later become the setting for his internationally-acclaimed “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
The writer of fiction, screenplays and journalism is known for his skillful use of magic realism, which his stories playfully employ to skew reality and refine emotion.
The volume, published by Literature Mondadori, will launch in tandem with the start of the Madrid Book Fair. It also marks the publishing house’s 500th book.
Marquez was born in 1928 in the town of Aracataca, northern Colombia, but as an adult he has largely lived abroad, in Rome, Paris and Mexico.
He has published more than 23 works, of which his novels, including “Love in the Time of Cholera,” have garnered the most praise.
Marquez’s most recent novel, 2005’s “Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores,” was panned by some critics and in 2008 Marquez’s agent reportedly questioned whether he had stopped writing.
But the publisher of “All Stories” said the release of this collection, wrapped in the vintage cover of a 1970s volume of collected stories, underlines Marquez’s “impressive” and enduring “legacy of literature.”