Journalistic Work, LITERATURA RANDOM HOUSE (September 2018)
“Journalism is the profession that most closely resembles boxing, with the advantage that the machine always wins, and the disadvantage that we’re not allowed to throw in the towel.”
In his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez describes how his earliest, deepest vocation was always to become a writer. Working as a journalist was never part of his plan until a master of the profession showed him the possibilities of reporting as a literary genre. Persuaded that "novel and article are children of the same mother," he learned the trade, became passionate about it, and devoted the best pages of his literary production to it for decades.
This volume contains a selection of García Márquez’s most masterful chronicles. In these stories, there’s no lack of continued reflection on the trade of journalist and novelist. The reader will discover a fascination with stories that challenge our image of reality, sometimes because we’ll never fully understand them, such as the mysterious Wilma Montesi case, after which this book is named. And sometimes because they force us to look at the world with new eyes, open to marvelling at the contradictions, misfortunes, and wonders that govern its unpredictable mechanism.
“His journalistic stories always include all the necessary components of journalism: the prior reporting, well-chosen quotes from sources, and descriptions of the moment and place in history. But they also contain all the key elements of a ‘story well told'.” Jon Lee Anderson