The Scandal of the Century: and Other Writings

A new collection of journalism from one of the great titans of twentieth century literature

I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize but rather for my journalism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 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.

The Scandal of the Century brings together 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 Pais. And while all the work points to his fiction in its style, wit, depth, and passion, 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’.