Today, in the early twenty-first century, mystery series are known as a widespread, profitable genre of children's literature. This was not always the case; while adult mystery series thrived in the late nineteenth century, mystery series for children did not appear on the American cultural landscape until the 1920s. When they arrived, they proved immensely popular. Led by the success of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, which debuted in 1927 and 1930, respectively, the literature of teen detection multiplied during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. In those same years, youth itself commanded attention in the news and entertainment media; during the course of the early to mid twentieth century, teenagers were increasingly recognized as a distinct and potent category of social identity. As this recognition developed, so did adult concerns about the separatist nature of youth culture, its tendency to develop new cultural styles and mores that opposed white middle-class standards of decency. Youth historians Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, surveying the twentieth-century discourse of adolescence, have noted in it “the bifurcated social identity of youth as a vicious, threatening sign of social decay and 'our best hope for the future.'” Crime writing proved a useful venue for expressing both identities. In children's mysteries, adults wrote of teens who saved the world; in the adult-oriented genres of journalism and pulp fiction, adults wrote of teens as juvenile delinquents who augured America's doom.

Gabriel García Márquez was born on 7 March 1927 in the dusty small town of Aracataca, some 80 kilometres (50 miles) from Colombia's Caribbean shore. For some decades hence, and for reasons unknown, he had mistakenly given his birth date as 1928. Owing to family conflicts, 'Gabito' (his childhood nickname) was at first raised by his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez and Tranquilina Iguarán. The grandfather was an imposing figure. A hero on the Liberal side in Colombia's 1899-1902 civil war, he was also a natty dresser with fine manners, who served a term as Aracataca's mayor. In addition, he was an excellent paternal surrogate, teaching the boy to use the dictionary, telling him war stories and leading him by the hand hither and yon about town. For his first nine years, Gabito grew up in a loving household, surrounded by aunts who encouraged his curiosity and storytelling bent. They filled his mind with much of the folklore and family lore that eventually enriched his fiction. In Aracataca he attended the local Montessori school, learning to see and examine with discipline. It was the only elementary institution that he would recall with great affection. At age nine, Gabito went to live with his parents in the town of Sincé. (Grandpa Nicolás passed away a short while later.) The boy scarcely knew the couple. His birth, in fact, had been the culmination of a long chain of events.

'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.

The vast majority of critical readings of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad [1967]) appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, well before the recent rise of eco-criticism. The pioneer theorist of eco-critical readings, Lawrence Buell, published his seminal book on this subject, The Environmental Imagination, in the early 1990s, and since then a growing number of scholars and readers have been increasingly aware of the multiple roles and representations of nature in literature.Inevitably, many discussions of nature in literature lead to parallel considerations of elements that are not considered part of the natural world: culture and technology. In this study, I will begin with a discussion of background canonical literary texts for an understanding of nature and technology in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and then move to an eco-critical reading of García Márquez's work, with emphasis on One Hundred Years of Solitude. What is eco-criticism? I would bring to the discussion a 1999 definition constructed by the editors of a special issue on ecocriticsm of New Literary History that emphasises focus on the non-human. In this analysis, I will attempt to show how García Márquez constructs an elaborate and complex web of nature of multiple sources, but many of which, in fact, are human rather than non-human parts of nature. Of the human sources, two of the most noteworthy with respect to the representation of nature are, first, other literary texts and, second, oral tradition. I will explore each in this study.

“[My relationship with cinema] is like that of a poorly-matched married couple. That is to say, I can't live with cinema, and I can't live without it. And, to judge by the number of offers that I get from producers, cinema feels the same way about me.” / García Márquez's provocative statement regarding his relationship to cinema provides a sound starting point for the consideration of this Colombian writer and his filmic endeavours. Certainly, the number of Garciamarquian film projects is large and still growing, as attested to by British director Mike Newell's filming of El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) (released in the Americas in 2007), Mexican director Carlos Carrera's filming of Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping) and Costa Rican Hilda Hidalgo's 2009 film of Del amor y otros demonios (Of Love and Other Demons). The frequency of García Márquez's film-related projects, and those of others to bring his work to the big screen, is thus clear, but these, for a variety of reasons as will be discussed below, have not always lived up to their potential. Whilst García Márquez is undoubtedly best known as the Nobel Prizewinning novelist, his contribution to, and adaptations within, the cinematic realm cannot be underestimated. His relationship with cinema has been prolonged and complex, and he has played a variety of roles, ranging from film critic, scriptwriter, director, member of a variety of film-related organisations and, of course, inspiration for the large number of cinematic adaptations based on his narrative output. We can thus consider his contribution to cinema in terms of three broad areas: García Márquez on cinema, García Márquez as cinema and García Márquez in cinema.

Whatever else one might say about García Márquez's view of love, his treatment of it is remarkably consistent. That view shows love as an irresistible force that overwhelms the rational mind and sweeps those in its grasp to the margins of conventional society. Social practices and institutions are anathema to the kind of passionate obsessions explored in Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada [1981]), Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera [1985]), Love and Other Demons (Del amor y otros demonios [1994]) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Memoria de mis putas tristes [2004]). Small wonder that love is at times confused with virulent diseases such as cholera and rabies, which cause their victims to be placed in quarantine. Love can seem a distinctly dangerous affliction. And it is an affliction almost always suffered by men - the women's (or usually adolescent girls') stories of love are mere glimpses. Men's suffering seems to bear out the notion that 'nothing in this world is more difficult than love', though fundamentally in García Márquez there is nothing remotely to compare with love's intoxicating wonder. Chronicle of a Death Foretold focuses on how society impedes the fulfillment of individual lives. In particular, it shows how the most important aspects of human experience are obstructed because social conventions take priority. Unlike the other novels considered here, love does not drive the narrative in Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Two central ideas guide this essay. Firstly, The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto [1989]), while not perhaps the most important of Gabriel García Márquez's novels, is nevertheless a culmination of his career as a writer, a kind of compact summa: not only because it is a literary biography of Latin America's greatest historical icon by a man himself unusually famous and always intrigued by failed heroes, but also because, typologically, it is the book which contains the largest number of different themes and trademark elements which may be identified, in variable degrees, in those other works by García Márquez that preceded and succeeded it. Second, death and burial are perhaps the most compelling and enduring of these central themes that shape García Márquez's writing, just as they shape life itself, and therefore it was particularly appropriate that the Colombian novelist should concentrate on the events leading up to the death of the Great Liberator after so successfully bringing him to life.

It is often thought that Gabriel García Márquez was principally responsible for a worldwide popularity of the marvellous in late-twentieth-century fiction, but this claim, like the phrase 'magical realism' itself, now involves a measure of cliché and confusion. The most popular version of the story, the one that everyone 'knows', is that in the 1960s a generation of 'Boom' novelists in Latin America devised a mixture of 'magic' and 'realism' which subsequently extended to almost all parts of the globe. 'Magical realism' draws on pre-scientific folk belief to subvert the 'Western' commitment to scientific reason, itself associated with both imperialism and a history of realist representation so that the genre is intrinsically oppositional and progressive. Since García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad [1967]) was the most popular, substantial and summative work in this mode, it is the principal source from which magical realism became a dominant form in late-twentieth-century fiction worldwide. There is considerable truth in this story, and writers from around the world, such as Salman Rushdie, have acknowledged the importance of his example. Nonetheless, this broad-brush account obfuscates a number of important questions and may occlude a different story. The aim here is to highlight some less noticed aspects by considering more closely what 'world', 'literature' and the 'marvellous' might mean in García Márquez.

Serious criticism of Gabriel García Márquez began in the late 1960s, with a particular breakthrough in 1967, the year of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad). Before that critical date, however, Volkening, Loveluck and Harss (who is said to have introduced the term 'Boom') had already recognised that a potentially important new figure had emerged in Spanish American fiction. Early criticism of the Boom tended to approach early Boom fiction from standpoints associated with readings of older regional novels by writers such as Ricardo Güiraldes and Rómulo Gallegos in the 1920s. Thus Volkening begins by lamenting the tendency to relate contemporary Spanish American fiction to European and North American models (Joyce, Faulkner) and demanding that the 'criollo (i.e. Spanish American) author' be evaluated on his own terms. He goes on to suggest that García Márquez (before One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course) continues the creative pattern of the regional novel but with 'new means of expression'. At the same time, however, like Ángel Rama in the following year, he emphasises the 'dry realism' of García Márquez's style and his tone of social protest. This was not how much future criticism would develop. Loveluck, on the other hand, immediately emphasises García Márquez's newness and associates it right away with 'overcoming outworn nativist and costumbrist formulae'. It is noteworthy that at this point the idea of the Boom had not yet gelled, and Loveluck places García Márquez correctly alongside Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso and Mario Vargas Llosa, but allows Rosario Castellanos, Enrique Lafourcade and David Viñas to get into the act.

The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975) is a text as robustly resistant to confident evaluation as any other by García Márquez, who described it as 'a poem on the solitude of power', a 'poetic adventure' and a highly personal 'book of confession'. Reminiscing with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he situates his intuition of the mystery of power in a scene he witnesses as a reporter in Caracas in 1958 just after the fall of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez: “It was nearly four in the morning, when the door opened and we saw an officer, in combat gear, walking backwards, with muddy boots and a sub-machine gun in his hands . . . pointing with the machine gun, and dirtying the carpet with the mud from his boots. He went down the stairs, got into a car which took him to the airport, and went into exile. It was at that precise moment, when that soldier was leaving a room where the formation of the new government was being decided, that I had the intuition of power, the mystery of power.” / Power is a glass ball in the palm of one's hand, but it may also be a slippery fish 'swimming around without god or law' ('un sábalo vivo que nadaba sin dios ni ley'). The initial inspiration for the aesthetic of The Autumn of the Patriarch was 'the image of an inconceivably old dictator who ends up alone in a palace full of cows'.

The publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) in Buenos Aires in May 1967 represented, according to the great Latin American writer and critic Mario Vargas Llosa, 'a literary earthquake'. Literariness is a sensitive notion in the criticism of Latin American fiction and is often subordinated to issues of the political impact of texts - be it at the level of authorial stance, interpretation of content or the context of reception and consumption. Yet the literary nature of García Márquez's great work is not a topic that can or should be avoided. Critics who are more consciously politically motivated may feel uncomfortable if we begin with the rather obvious assertion, then, that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a work of fiction. The rise of the Latin American New Novel from, roughly, the 1940s and 1950s onwards and its culmination in the so-called Boom of the 1960s was associated in the minds of many observers with a reaction against traditional realism based on an assumption that reality was observable, understandable and translatable into literature. Equally, many would regard 1967 and the appearance of One Hundred Years of Solitude as the culmination of that process. The novel opens with José Arcadio Buendía, the founding father of Macondo (the imaginary town in which much of the narrative is set), inviting his offspring to read with their imaginations rather than in relation to their knowledge of reality: in a room plastered with unrealistic maps and fabulous drawings, he teaches them to read by telling them of 'the wonders of the world' ('las maravillas del mundo') and 'forcing the limits of his or their imagination to extremes'.

From the start it is necessary to establish that the three novels gathered under the above rubric were written over a period spanning almost a decade and represent a variety of influences and styles that resist reduction to a single type. According to the author, he began work on Leaf Storm (La hojarasca) as early as 1950, when he was living in the northern Colombian locations of Sucre and Barranquilla. Although initially rejected by an Argentine publishing house, the novel eventually appeared in Bogotá, in 1955. In the intervening years, García Márquez published a short story, 'Winter' ('El invierno'), which was filleted out of the larger narrative, in December 1952; he subsequently published it again under the revised title of 'Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo' ('Monólogo de Isabel viendo llover en Macondo') in October-November 1955. Together with the slightly earlier story, 'Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait' ('Nabo, el negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles' [1951]), 'Monologue of Isabel' exemplifies the early influence on García Márquez of William Faulkner, whom he first read in 1949 and whose narrative vision, expressed paradigmatically in As I Lay Dying, underpins the conception and architecture of Leaf Storm. No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, 1958) was penned not in Colombia but in France, where the author was working as a journalist and living in fabled penury, in 1956.

Gabriel García Márquez is much more than a writer: he has become something of an icon in his native Colombia and throughout Latin America, as well as a darling of the chattering classes throughout the world. The towering success of his 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), the wide popular appeal of his best-selling Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera [1985]), his Nobel Prize triumph in 1982 and his general association with the assiduously promoted Latin American New Novel and the marketing of the related phenomenon of magical realism - all of these factors were key in his national and international projection as the voice of Colombian, Latin American and even 'Third-World' identity alongside his identification with a new type of globally influential tropical, exotic, fantastic literature. By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, his status as icon was solidified by a number of big 'events': the fortieth anniversary of the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the much-hyped publication by the Real Academia Española and the Asociacin de Academias de la Lengua Española of a special commemorative edition (including a reprinted essay by Mario Vargas Llosa, which helped generate more publicity as it fuelled press speculation of a possible end to the rift between the two writers prompted famously by a bout of fisticuffs outside a Mexican cinema in 1976); the appearance of what has been widely touted as García Márquez's 'last' novel in 2004, coming out in English translation in 2005 under the title of Memories of My Melancholy Whores; and the much anticipated arrival in 2002 (2004 in English) of the first - and, many think, only - volume of the author's memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir para contarla).

Gabriel García Márquez has been a journalist and fiction writer all his life, and the two genres have intertwined throughout his career. Raymond L. Williams pointedly explains that “journalism has been a constant presence in García Márquez's literary career and personal biography. García Márquez the novelist has gained far more from journalism than just 'contact with reality'. A reading of his journalistic writings during this period, in fact, shows a writer experimenting with a variety of styles, techniques, and genres. Both the enormous volume of García Márquez's journalism and its intimate relationship to his fiction make his journalistic writings essential to a complete study of this work.” / The connection between García Márquez's fiction and his non-fiction is represented by the refrito, or follow-up story, which provides information discovered or events happening after the publication of the original story. The fact that the follow-up story builds upon an already published story often gives it a pejorative connotation and lowly status among journalists. The intersection of his fiction and non-fiction starts during the investigative reporting phase of his work for El Espectador in Bogotá, Colombia in 1954-5. García Márquez wrote three series of follow-up stories in which his writing and narrative technique start to develop.

Machiavelli's reputation rests above all on his political-historical writings, and secondarily on his notable contribution to the re-emergence of classicizing comic drama. Yet, as scholarship has increasingly shown, he was also profoundly engaged with poetry and poets, as reader and writer. This chapter focuses attention on four interrelated dimensions of Machiavelli's engagement with poetry: the “poetic” dimensions of the nonpoetic works (citations of and allusions to poetry, use of poetic devices and strategies); the poems he wrote; the poets he read (and more or less obliquely rewrote); and his “poetics,” that is, his concept(s) of what poetry is and what it does, and its relationship to other modes of discourse, particularly the political historical. What Machiavelli's “realism” consists of is a source of ongoing scholarly debate. The general perception that he had little patience for the world of imaginative fictions remains alive and well among readers of The Prince and the Discourses. For such readers, the fact that Machiavelli frequently names poets and allusively echoes poetry in these nonpoetic works has commonly been dismissed as attributable, on the one hand, to the fundamentally literary-rhetorical character of upper-class education in his time (which was immersed in classical Latin literature), and, on the other, to the increasing importance assigned by Florentine culture to its vernacular literary heritage, above all the newly canonized “three crowns” of the fourteenth century: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

The number of books and articles written during the past twenty years on the relationship between science and religion is truly amazing, and new ones are coming out almost every day. The ideas propounded vary widely and the question arises of whether it is possible to classify these differing viewpoints in any meaningful way. An important challenge in the science-religion discussion is therefore to categorize the main ways of relating science and religion. How might this be done in an illuminating and unbiased way that is neither too simplistic nor too complex? The best-known attempt to offer such an account is Ian Barbour's four-fold typology: the conflict view, the integration view, the dialogue view and the independence view. Others scholars such as Willem B. Drees, John Haught, Ted Peters and myself have responded to Barbour's work and suggested modifications or alternative typologies. In this chapter I shall try to take these discussions a step further.