This book examines one of the most influential Latin American writers of the last decades. Arango explores Gabriel García Márquez’s origins, relevance, and themes to provide a new assessment of his Caribbean background and the deep roots of his work in popular culture.

This long-awaited biography provides a fascinating and comprehensive picture of García Márquez's life up to the publication of his classic 100 Years of Solitude. Based on nearly a decade of research, this biographical study sheds new light on the life and works of the Nobel Laureate, father of magical realism, and bestselling author in the history of the Spanish language. As García Márquez's impact endures on well into his ninth decade, Stavans's keen insights constitute the definitive re-appraisal of the literary giant's life and corpus. The later part of his life will be covered in a second book.

Over the past twenty years, Chinese novelist Yan Lianke has emerged as one of the most important writers in the world. In Discovering Fiction, Yan offers insights into his views on literature and realism, the major works that inspired him, and his theories of writing. He juxtaposes discussions of the high realism of Leo Tolstoy and Lu Xun against Franz Kafka’s modernism and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism, charting the relationship between causality, truth, and modes of realism. He also discusses his approach to realism, which he terms “mythorealism”—a way of capturing the world’s underlying truth by relying on the allegories, myths, legends, and dreamscapes that emerge from daily life. Revealing and instructive, Discovering Fiction gives readers an unprecedented look into the mind and art of a literary giant.

Charys visual expression reveals simultaneously her displacement from and re-encounter with a nation that is marked by a long history of dispossession and cultural intermixing. Her art can perhaps be best understood in the context of the Cuban avant-garde movement, which, in turn, resonates against the costumbrista and paisajista movements. In addition to revealing a search for cultural origins, Charys art highlights the importance of the landscape as well as the inclusion of regional iconography and folklore. It reveals the presence of distinct elements, patterns, rhythms and cultural forms first explored by the first generation of Cuban vanguardia artists, who distinguished themselves according to their use of bright colors, patterns and baroque visual rhythms. Seeking to somehow define the essence of Cuban culture and forge a new national identity, the vanguardia artists of the 1920s located the national in the picturesque and drew upon the countryside as a powerful source of visual iconography. Like many of the vanguardia artists, Chary employs iconographical symbols and elements in an attempt to explore and recapture the many sources of Cuban culture from her childhood. Though her work is drawn primarily from her imagination, it is anchored in the artists memories of the Cuban countryside. Chary draws upon the landscape in an effort to explore her own sense of loss and displacement. When I paint landscapes, she tells me, they are always Cuban; when I paint fruit, they are tropical. The fruit and the roosters that appear in my work not only represent my Cuban roots, but they also enable me to process the past. Charys canvases are habitats populated with sensuous flora and fabulous fauna. Rendered primarily in pen and ink, fantastical animals and exotic fruit spring to life on her canvases in frenetic swirls and chiaroscuro. Although they are reminiscent of her earlier work, her most recent creations tend to be more abstract, or focus more specifically on pattern and form. For Chary, the abstract represents a way of commenting on loss as well as her own personal battles. For me, she explains, painting is a mode of survival. Chary renders in brilliant inks and fluorescent acrylics an inventory of a past informed by movement and loss. She cultivates a symbolic language that serves to define certain fundamental aspects of what is means to be a Cuban in diaspora, and in the process recaptures the translucent colors and the dazzling tropical forms of the island she left behind. Light and form become symbol in Charys art. It generates unexpected paradigms that reproduce and transform the ordinary in an exuberant, dancelike strugglea poetic renderingof movement, color and form.

Originally published in 1988, the last few decades had seen the appearance of some brilliant and complex new kinds of fiction. The ambitious experiments of writers such as Greene, Garcia Márquez, Borges, Nabakov, Calvino, Beckett, Eco, Spark, Hoban, Murdoch, Bellow, Ozick, and Lessing among others had all proved the vitality of contemporary fiction in discovering exciting new forms and styles. Yet because of the difficulty of many of the texts, contemporary fiction as a genre had acquired an undeservedly unpopular reputation among students and other readers. In a very real way, the reader had become nervous rather than confident in the face of a literature that in fact is more aware of and generous to that reader than earlier and more apparently accessible literature ever managed to be. And the new fiction’s seeming remoteness from the reader is exaggerated, in a sense, by the critical academic response at the time, which tended to obscure the texts themselves behind the many aesthetic and cultural theories which had sprung up in the study of fictionalizing or narrativity in general. Elizabeth Dipple is anxious to dispel readers’ fears about these texts. She has chosen an international list of major writers of the time and presents a detailed discussion of each. Beginning each chapter with a brief explanation of the context in which each fictionist is to be examined, she then concentrates on an analysis of key texts, aiming always to look beyond jargon and theory back to the sources themselves. Professor Dipple’s purpose was to convey to the reader some of her own admiration and enthusiasm for contemporary fiction and to persuade him or her to take a fresh look at a group of writers who were producing what she felt would surely be seen by future generations as among the most sophisticated and accomplished fiction of our time.