García Márquez's novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), initially started as a journalistic piece, draws from a real event where a group of brothers pledge to kill the man who dishonored their sister. This work earned García Márquez the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Max Mermelstein, after marrying a Colombian, quickly became entangled with the world's most influential drug cartels. In his book, Inside the Cocaine Cartel: The Riveting Eyewitness Account of Life inside the Colombian Cartel (1993), Mermelstein, who testified against Pablo Escobar, shares his experiences with cocaine traffickers and details his eventual betrayal of them.

Edited by Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda, The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (1998) compiles around sixty examples of literary journalism written by authors from various countries and eras.

The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now (1995) features a collection of essays by Alma Guillermoprieto, originally published in The New Yorker. These essays examine Latin America in the early 1990s, focusing on the impact of the Medellín and Cali cartels on Colombia's economy and political scene.

García Márquez gained worldwide fame in 1967 with the release of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel, deeply rooted in the magical realism genre, narrates the epic saga of the Buendía family and the upheaval that defines Latin America from the postcolonial 1820s to the 1920s.

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915) narrates the tale of Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a massive insect. García Márquez cites this novel as one of his literary influences.