Innocent Erendira and Other Stories

"The stories are rich and startling in their matter and confident in their manner....They are--the word cannot be avoided--magical."--John Updike, The New Yorker This collection of fiction, representing some of García Márquez's earlier work, includes eleven short stories and a novella, Innocent Eréndira, in which a young girl who dreams of freedom cannot escape the reach of her vicious and avaricious grandmother. "García Márquez's fictional universe has the same staggeringly gratifying density and texture as Proust's Faubourg Saint-Germain and Joyce's Dublin....Arguably the best of the Latin Americans."--Martin Kaplan, The New Republic "It is the genius of the mature García Márquez that fatalism and possibility somehow coexist, that dreams redeem, that there is laughter even in death.'--John Leonard, New York Times