Dejo muy claro Gabriel Garcia Marquez que el periodismo siempre fue su principal pasion, la mas perdurable y por la que quiso ser recordado: "No quiero que se me recuerde por Cien anos de soledad, ni por el premio Nobel, sino por el periodico. [...] Naci periodista y hoy me siento mas reportero que nunca. Lo llevo en la sangre, me tira".

Esta antologia pretende ser la muestra mas representativa de la tension narrativa entre periodismo y literatura que recorrio toda su trayectoria como reportero. Cubriendo cuatro decadas, este delicioso viaje a traves de medio centenar de textos muestra como "el mejor oficio del mundo" esta en el corazon de la obra del premio Nobel colombiano.

Con edicion a cargo de Cristobal Pera y prologo de Jon Lee Anderson, este volumen contiene piezas tan indispensables como los reportajes escritos desde Roma sobre la muerte de una joven italiana, suceso que permitio al autor pintar un fresco incomparable de las elites politicas y artisticas del pais en un marco de novela policiaca, cronicas sobre la vida tras el "telon de acero", sobre la trata de blancas desde Paris hasta America Latina o apuntes sobre Fidel Castro o Pio XII. Encontramos tambien fragmentos tempranos en los que aparecen por primera vez las familias Buendia y Aracataca, junto con articulos que contemplan la politica, la sociedad y la cultura bajo la luz solida, profunda y experimentada de ese gran contador de historias que siempre sera maestro de periodistas.

ENGLISH 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 Garcia Marquez 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 Pais. 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."