Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories

Gabriel García Márquez

Knopf, 1994 - Fiction - 188 pages

These twelve extraordinary stories by South America's preeminent man of letters, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the renowned classic One Hundred Years of Solitude and the international best-seller Love in the Time of Cholera, are set in contemporary Europe and recount the peculiar and amazing experiences that befall Latin Americans visiting or living abroad. An ailing Caribbean ex-President is befriended in Geneva by an ambitious ambulance driver and his headstrong wife. Margarito Duarte comes to Rome from the Colombian Andes with a box the shape and size of a cello case in order to show the Pope its contents. A woman who wears a snake ring with emerald eyes and is known only as Frau Frieda to the Latin American students in Vienna makes a living by telling her dreams to wealthy families. A pretty Mexican music hall performer is returning to Barcelona when her car breaks down, and she ends up in an insane asylum. In Tuscany, a vacationing family visits a Renaissance castle now owned by a famous Venezuelan writer and meets up with a phantom. Maria dos Prazeres, once Barcelona's most sought-after lady of the night, has a dream in which death appears, so she begins to plan her own funeral. A widow dressed in the habit of Saint Francis sails to Rome from Argentina to meet the Pope. A beautiful Caribbean boy is driven mad in Spain. A German governess destroys the summer for her wards - and is herself destroyed. Billy Sanchez takes his pregnant wife with a cut on her ring finger to a hospital in Paris - and never sees her again. Once again in this breathtaking collection, Gabriel Garcia Marquez invites us into worlds of majesty and magic, from which we emerge spellbound.

Contents

• Bon Voyage Mr President: 3
• The Saint: 36
• Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane: 54

About the author

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927. After studying law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogota, he became a journalist. In 1965, he left journalism, to devote himself to writing. His works included Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, The Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth, Clandestine in Chile, and the memoir Living to Tell the Tale. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He died on April 17, 2014 at the age of 87.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories; Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century; Penguin books
• Author: Gabriel García Márquez
• Translated by: Edith Grossman
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Knopf, 1994
• ISBN: 0140239405, 9780140239409
• Length: 188 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Anthologies (multiple authors); Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)