Published together in one volume for the first time, this book contains all the short stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Opening with 'The Third Resignation', a strange and haunting tale of a man living his own death, and concluding with the story of Innocent Erendira, the young girl who accidentally burns down the house of her grandmother and is forced into a life of prostitution and slavery to repay her debt, in between come a further twenty-four stories all teeming with invention, fluctuation between despair and optimism. In one a dying senator fins the woman of his life, another a bedraggled angel crash-lands in a village; and 'for all the world's unbelievers', her is the 'true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived for ninety-two years, and died in the odour of sanctity last one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope'. Marquez's stories, we know, are dazzling; but to read them in this collection is to embark upon a journey deep into the inseparable worlds of reality and illusion which are the hallmark of his fiction, a journey to the heart of consciousness itself.
The Collected Stories not only displays the range of his unique talent, it demonstrates a complete vision and is further testimony to the genius of a brilliant myth-maker and master fabulist.
- ISBN10 0224032399
- ISBN13 9780224032391
- Publish Date 19 September 1991 (first published 1 January 1900)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 6 April 1999
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 292
- Language English