For an excellent study of old age, with considerable attention given to sexuality, see Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age (1972).

In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Garcia Marquez's best known and highly acclaimed novel, the author employs the technique of "magical realism," which blends the real with the fantastic in a comic masterpiece that chronicles six generations of a family in the town of Macondo, a microcosm of Colombia.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is Garcia Marquez's 1975 novel about the evils of despotism as embodied in a solitary dictator.

One of his collections of short stories, No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968) features Garcia Marquez's short fiction written during the early 1960s. Critics often commend the stories in this volume.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) is Garcia Marquez's fictionalized journalistic investigation of Chile's Pinochet regime. The novella profiles a society trapped in its own myths.

In The Last Song of Manuel Sendero (1987), Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean novelist and playwright, combines the real and the surreal in this novel about love, tyranny, freedom, and the anguish of exile.

Violence, Conflict and Politics in Colombia (1980), by Paul H. Oquist offers some insights into the history and politics that shaped the fiction of Garcia Marquez.