Published in 1967, the novel was an instant success, running to hundreds of editions, winning four international prizes and being translated into 27 languages. In 1982, its author received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Michael Wood places the novel in the context of modern Colombia's violent history, and helps the reader to explore the rich and complex vision of the world which Garcia Marquez presents in it. Close reference is made to the text itself (in English translation), and there is a guide to further reading.

    Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. Odas elementales was published in 1954, followed in subsequent years by Nuevas odas elementales and Tercer libro de las odas. Margaret Sayers Peden's selection of odes from all three volumes, printed with the Spanish originals on facing pages, is by far the most extensive yet to appear in English. She vividly conveys the poet's vision of the realities of day-to-day life in her trans-lations, while her brief introduction describes the genesis of the poems.

    Brimming with unforgettable characters and set in exotic locales, his fiction transports readers to a world that is at once fanciful, haunting, and real. Leaf Storm, Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez's first novella, introduces the mythical village of Macondo, a desolate town beset by torrents of rain, where a man must fulfill a promise made years earlier. No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella of life in a decaying tropical town in Colombia with an unforgettable central character. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a dark and profound story of three people joined together in a fatal act of violence.Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. His many books include the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

    Topics range from the religious rites of the Aztecs to modern american painting, from Eastern art and religion to love and eroticism. Translated by Helen Lane.