The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World | The Master of Short Forms

In the following essay, this author discusses Garcia Marquez's short fiction, including "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," which he calls a "folklore science-fiction."

Had Garcia Marquez never put any of his novels to paper, his shorter fiction would have still gained him some niche in literary history. Already in 1967 the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti was to observe that "some of the stories gathered in Big Mama's Funeral can be considered among the most perfect instances of the genre ever written in Latin America." We might venture yet further and say that those pieces, along with the novella No One Writes to the Colonel and the stories collected in Innocent Erendira, put Garcia Marquez in the company of such acknowledged...

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