“An engaging, informative study tracking the small beginnings of a literary giant and his magnum opus...Stavans enlightens us, not just about one literary figure, but about the culture and history of a whole hemisphere... Stavans is a magical writer himself.” —Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, and Once Upon A Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA

“Stavan's style is clear and accessible, amazing detailed yet magnetically mesmerizing. He's a wonderfully skilled writer exploring the world of Garcia's Marquez's life and times-- what shaped his aesthetics, the forces that honed his social sensibilities and his literary influences; extraordinary-- a must-read.” —Jimmy Santiago Baca, author of A Glass of Water

“Ilan Stavans offers a vivid and humane account of Gabriel García Márquez and his world in the first four decades of his life, from the banana trains of his native Aracataca and the Caribbean...to his experience as a journalist in Europe, his belief in Hemingway's power as a writer, and the surprise of One Hundred Years of Solitude and of his sudden emergence as a world-famous writer who would win the Nobel Prize.” —Werner Sollors, author of Beyond Ethnicity and Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

“Reading Ilan Stavans's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Early Years, I was reminded of Chekhov's observation that if you write a story about a man, a woman, and a beetle, the story is always about a man and a woman. In his compelling narrative of Garcia Marquez before the phenomenon of One hundred Years of Solitude, Ilan Stavans takes us on a fascinating guided tour of the great man's world from childhood to maturity, along the way, collecting the objects and the subjects, the beetles and the battles, all that would eventually coalesce into the vision of plenitude contained in one of the most influential novels in modern literary history. ” —Judith Ortiz Cofer, author of The Latin Deli and Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English, University of Georgia

“Ilan Stavans has given us a wondrous rendering of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who always wanted to be a magician, and ended up creating a magical kingdom in a tiny Caribbean town. Stavans displays his own magical hand in this muscular portrait of Garcia Marquez as a young man. ” —Jerome Charyn, author of The Secret Life Emily Dickinson