The present volume of essays on Gabriel García Márquez was originally conceived in 1983, shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Apart from extending critical appreciation of his work to an English-reading public, its principal objective was to reflect the breadth and variety of current critical approaches to literature applied to a single corpus of writing. By no means all of the writer's prolific output is dealt with here, though his major novels and a selection of his short fiction are covered. Equally, the range of critical method, while not exhaustive, seeks to encompass practical criticism, thematic, formalist-structuralist, anthropological, psychoanalytical, Marxist, philosophy of language and deconstructionist readings.

The first three contributions deal with the early phase of short fiction which García Márquez himself saw as the key to his first universally acclaimed masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. Richard Cardwell's analysis of the techniques of characterization in Big Mama's Funeral, specifically in ‘One of these Days’ and ‘Tuesday Siesta’, reflects the pluralistic critical approach of liberal humanism, elaborating on the writer's avowed commitment to ‘write well’ by demonstrating one of the principal resources of García Márquez the ‘teller of tales’. In contrast, Eduardo Gonzalez approaches a single story from the same collection from an angle of anthropology. His study, involving a critique of the structural method, views ‘Baltazar's Prodigious Afternoon’ in the light of the celebrated Marcel Mauss essay on ‘gift-exchange’.