Although Garcia Marquez wrote "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" several years before it and other short stories were published in English in 1972, most readers of English at that time knew only of his most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many early reviewers were somewhat disappointed in the sparse, short stories. They contained neither the grand historic sweep of One Hundred Years nor the complex character development that wins reader affection through increased familiarity. John Sturrock in the New York Times Book Review considered the stories "makeweights," "the ambitious but as yet uncertain and over-abstract tales of a writer too young to recognize that even the most imaginative fiction needs to be filled with things as well as strange thoughts." Some reviewers expressed distaste for the Garcia Marquez's style. John Leonard in the New York Times called them "rather typical examples of postwar...