Dos soledades

In September 1967, some young Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa met in Lima to discuss Latin American literature. The first had already sold thousands of copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The second had just won the Rómulo Gallegos Award for La casa verde. Today both are universally considered two of the greatest exponents of literature in Spanish, but at that time they were two young people who were beginning their careers as novelists. In Dos soledades, two writers, two literary geniuses, two different ways of understanding literature, two somewhat contradictory temperaments, two different ways of narrating, are placed face to face. These are the times when the boom is brewing, when a name has not yet been coined for what we know today as "magical realism". In these exciting pages, the reader attends a conversation like no other. The edition incorporates texts by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Luis Rodríguez Pastor, José Miguel Oviedo, Abelardo Oquendo, Abelardo Sánchez León and Ricardo González Vigil, who recall, most as witnesses, that dialogue; and, in addition, two interviews with the Colombian writer, a photographic selection, and Vargas Llosa's assessment of the life and work of García Márquez today.