Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is unable to write, his brother said recently, because of dementia cancer treatments. But a colleague has told the N.Y. Times that the author is no more impaired than the average 85-year-old. “I saw him in April,”  Jaime Abellos, the director of the Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation in Cartagena, Colombia, told the N.Y. Times . “He is a man of 85 with the normal signs of his age.”  That runs counter to the assessment of Marquez's decline put forward by his brother Jaime Garcia Marquez.

Gabriel García Márquez's “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” first published in 1967, is a novel set in a bygone era of Colombian history without much technology to speak of. Now the book itself is finally starting to enter the digital age. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is not yet available as an e-book. But now you can travel to the fictional Macondo in an audio book, from Blackstone Audio. The Ashland, Ore.-based company has acquired the unabridged audio rights to four works by García Márquez: “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” English translation by Gregory Rabassa; “Love in the Time of Cholera,” translated by Edith Grossman; “No One Writes to the Colonel,” translated by J. S. Bernstein; and “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” also translated by Edith Grossman.

One would think that out of two writers of the feature on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of them would have read his works. To assign the wonderful Fermina Daza the name Diaz, from "Love in the Time of Cholera," is insulting and uneducated. ELAINE BLYTH ANDERSON Santa Monica

Former President Clinton visited Colombia last week, meeting with President Juan Manuel Santos while visiting Cartagena, where Bogota Mayor Gustavo Petro showed him around the city in an electric taxi. Then Clinton took time out to visit with Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez , 86. Marquez has been said to be suffering from dementia. Last summer, his brother, Jaime Garcia Marquez, announced that cancer treatments the writer had undergone hastened a memory decline.

For the theme of this sprawling, surreal novel, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez seems to have chosen Cole Porter's admonition, "Let's contemplate l'amour in all its infinite variety." With the calm assurance of a master story- teller, Marquez allows the narrative to ramble among digressions and flashbacks without ever relaxing his grip on the reader's attention.

IMAGINE STOCKHOLM IN DECEMBER, when it is nearly always nighttime. A 54-year-old son of Colombia's Caribbean coast has come to collect his Nobel Prize for Literature. It is 1982, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is already famous as the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which is selling better than the Bible in some Spanish-speaking countries. Garcia Marquez counts powerful men, including Cuban President Fidel Castro, among his closest friends.

Twelve out of 64; the figure comes from the prologue to these short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is its theme and the occasion for a precious insight into the alternating ticktock of creation and nothingness that painfully advances a writer's clock. The prologue, in fact, is one of the best pieces in "Strange Pilgrims" and this is not a reflection on what follows, some of which is splendid.

"The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor," as the author left-handedly suggests in his preface, is not so much a book as a publishing event. Seeing that the author is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a man of brilliance and of masquerades, the message is not to be taken straight. To him, a publishing event seems to be a subject for opprobrium; yet who knows? The story itself is a reissue of a series of newspaper articles he wrote 30 years ago for El Espectador of Bogota.

After a career that included 11 novels, four collections of short stories and several compilations of journalism, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez last year gave friends the disappointing news that he had "run out of gas" and was quitting writing. The author was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999, and after treatment at UCLA Medical Center, he recently was pronounced free of the disease.

THE suitor was determined, impassioned, even obsessed. But however fervently he pressed his case, he couldn't win over the object of his desire. Time and again he was told: I will not yield to you, not now, not ever. Of course, Hollywood producers are in the habit of whispering sweet nothings to writers, even non-Nobel laureates, in hopes of making them surrender.

Ashbel Green, 84, a respected editor at Alfred A. Knopf who persuaded Gabriel Garcia Marquez to switch publishers, worked on Walter Cronkite's memoir and a foreign policy book by President George H.W. Bushand helped discover the crime classic "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," died Tuesday night. Green had been dining with his wife, Elizabeth Osha, near their home in Stonington, Conn., when he died, the publisher announced. The cause was not given. Green was praised by the New York Observer as "an exemplar of elegance, decency and seriousness.

Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is unable to write, his brother said recently, because of dementia cancer treatments. But a colleague has told the N.Y. Times that the author is no more impaired than the average 85-year-old. “I saw him in April,”  Jaime Abellos, the director of the Gabriel García Márquez New Journalism Foundation in Cartagena, Colombia, told the N.Y. Times . “He is a man of 85 with the normal signs of his age.”  That runs counter to the assessment of Marquez's decline put forward by his brother Jaime Garcia Marquez.

Since Gabriel Garcia Marquez first published "Love in the Time of Cholera" internationally in 1988, he is said to have declined, much like a character in one of his books, something on the order of 50 offers to turn the novel into a film. Part of his reluctance to fork over the story to Hollywood apparently stemmed from his misgivings about subjecting one the greatest Spanish-language novels of the 20th century to an English-language adaptation.

Oprah Winfrey has picked "Love in the Time of Cholera," the epic love story by Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, as her next book club selection. "If you love love, this book is the best love story ever," Winfrey said Friday on her daytime talk show. The novel by the Colombian-born García Márquez was published in 1985. Set on the Caribbean coast of South America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it tells the tale of a woman and two men, and an unrequited love that spans 50 years.

After a career that included 11 novels, four collections of short stories and several compilations of journalism, Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez last year gave friends the disappointing news that he had "run out of gas" and was quitting writing. The author was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999, and after treatment at UCLA Medical Center, he recently was pronounced free of the disease.

THE suitor was determined, impassioned, even obsessed. But however fervently he pressed his case, he couldn't win over the object of his desire. Time and again he was told: I will not yield to you, not now, not ever. Of course, Hollywood producers are in the habit of whispering sweet nothings to writers, even non-Nobel laureates, in hopes of making them surrender.

Novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez wouldn't travel to Wales to the Hay literary festival, so the annual book fest dubbed "the Woodstock of the mind" has gone to him in his native Colombia. The idea of bringing an offshoot of the festival held in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye to the city of Cartagena was suggested by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who told festival founder Peter Florence that that was the only way Garcia Marquez would attend.

FANS of Gabriel Garcia Marquez might think "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is the eagerly awaited sequel to his recent memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale." But his new book's audacious handle is in many ways a bit of a joke. It is the first novel from "Gabo" (as he's affectionately referred to anywhere south of San Ysidro) in 10 years. Luminous and brief, it wondrously fuses an everyday plot with the high points of a long life span.