'Chronicle of a Death Foretold: “Match-Fixing Has to Be Sorted or Someone Will Be Assassinated”, Ian Botham, 2001.' The title of the article by Cole Moreton and Arifa Akbar on the mysterious death of Bob Woolmer, the coach of Pakistan's cricket team, is eloquent testimony to the way in which Gabriel García Márquez's fiction, rather like the shining metal cones in Jorge Luis Borges's 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', has mysteriously infiltrated the empirical world. That is why, perhaps, it is common for readers to measure García Márquez's fiction against the yardstick offered by magical realism, to see it as most authentic when most magical-realist and to view his fiction post One Hundred Years of Solitude as less original. But, as I hope to show, there are at least five distinguishing features of the best of his fiction - long and short - and magical realism is but one among five, albeit an important one. In this essay I propose to use the short fiction as a laboratory in which I test a few hypotheses about the distinctiveness of the Colombian's work in more general terms.