The Scandal of the Century, and Other Writings

Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

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 García Márquez 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 fiction-like reportage from Paris and Rome … his monthly columns for Spain’s El País. 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.”

Critics Review

  • “This brilliant collection…puts his journalism on the same level as his fiction, which is quite some level.”

    Salman Rushdie

  • “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.”

    New York Times

  • “An eye-opening collection of articles that reveal Gabo the journalist…The text is elegantly translated by McLean, and García Márquez fans will welcome these fresh and lively examples of his beautiful, lyrical writing.”

    Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  • “This incisive collection of journalistic pieces from the 1950s to the ’80s shows the acclaimed novelist and short story writer García Márquez in his original guise, as reporter…All reflect García Márquez’s humor, graceful style, and ability to find the human interest in every topic.”

    Publishers Weekly

  • “Whatever his focus, García Márquez is discerning, mesmerizing, and provocative, his timeless journalism works of art and dissent.”

    Booklist

More from the same

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.