Cristobal Pera

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 Garc a M rquez 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 Pa s. 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.

Desde el Romanticismo hasta nuestros dias el viaje a Paris como rito iniciatico ha sido un tema recurrente en la literatura hispanoamericana. La ciudad de Paris como -capital cultural de Hispanoamerica- se convirtio, ademas, en uno de los mitos basicos - junto al mito de la naturaleza - que preparan el camino para la indagacion de la identidad hispanoamericana. El proposito principal de este libro consiste en presentar el desarrollo de la imagen de Paris en la cultura de Hispanoamerica de fin de siglo, y mas especificamente en la prosa del Modernismo, a la luz de reflexiones de Walter Benjamin, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, Carlos J. Alonso o Anibal Gonzalez. Cristobal Pera explora la continuidad del mito de Paris en textos de Dario, Marti y Horacio Quiroga, en las cronicas de Gomez Carrillo, y en novelas como "De sobremesa," de J. A. Silva, "Idolos rotos," de Diaz Rodriguez, o "Raucho," de Guiraldes. El autor revisa el papel historico-literario que jugo el mito de Paris en el fin de siglo hispanoamericano, y como llega a convertirse en el contrapunto dialectico del mito de la naturaleza, proporcionando el cauce ideologico a la tendencia cultural y literaria que sucedera al Modernismo, la -novela de la tierra-."