The author Gabriel García Márquez lived and breathed for the journalistic profession up until his death in 2014. The Colombian considered himself an old school news reporter, more so than a novelist, and he wrote his fiction in the same style that he would use if reporting from a news event. This series is an homage to his journalistic writing philosophy. The covers are pastiches of old-fashioned newspaper aesthetics, with an eclectic mix of typographic styles and fake «ads» which convey information about the author and the novel in question.
This is the story of the rise and fall of the village Macondo. We follow the Buendía family through seven generations, from the village’s founding to its destruction. Just like the village, the family lives through all the stages in the progress of a civilization: colonization, growth, civil wars, industrialization, disasters, decay and oblivion. This work of magic realism is considered García Márquez’ magnus opum, and is his best-selling novel.
Santiago Nasar is going to die, and everyone knows it – except for himself. A bride has returned from her honeymoon, as she turned out not to be a virgin: a violation to her family’s honor that can only be restored by spilling blood.
During the attempt to catch an escaped parrot, Doctor Juvena Urbino falls of a ladder and dies, leaving his wife Fermina Daza a widow. No later than the day after the wake, 76 year-old Florentino Ariza shows up at her door. After Fermina rejected him 51 years, 9 months and 4 days ago, he has been obsessed with her. This is the starting point of the story of a man who has saved his virginity for 50 years for his loved one, and of a town desolated by war and cholera.
The story of the legendary South American freedom hero Símon Bolivar’s last days. His master idea was to create the greatest republic in the world, but his dreams were destroyed, and he became a sick, lonely and bitter man, unlike the idealized image of him passed through portraits and equestrian statues. This is a book about a man who was loved and acclaimed by millions, but who ended his life in humiliation.
The main character has never been with a woman without paying for it. He has recorded all the woman, and when he turned 50 the number amounted to 514. But he has never been in love. On his 90th anniversary, he phones ut Rosa Cabarcas, an old friend and owener of a secluded brothel. She offers him a night with a beautiful virgin of 14 years. Through the night, the girl sleeps while he watches her, and she wakes up, untouched. The old man’s life takes a new turn.
Folding out the back of each dust jacket, there is a fragment of the best interview with Gabriel García Márquez ever published, dated 1981 and printed in The Paris Review. The reader has to collect all five books in the series in order to read the entire interview – triggering a certain collector’s delight.
