"The stories are rich and startling in their matter and confident in their manner....They are--the word cannot be avoided--magical."--John Updike, The New Yorker

This collection of fiction, representing some of García Márquez's earlier work, includes eleven short stories and a novella, Innocent Eréndira, in which a young girl who dreams of freedom cannot escape the reach of her vicious and avaricious grandmother.

"Garcí­a Márquez's fictional universe has the same staggeringly gratifying density and texture as Proust's Faubourg Saint-Germain and Joyce's Dublin....

Arguably the best of the Latin Americans."--Martin Kaplan, The New Republic

"It is the genius of the mature Garcí­a Márquez that fatalism and possibility somehow coexist, that dreams redeem, that there is laughter even in death.'--John Leonard, New York Times