Bell-VHlada is an educator, critic, and biographer. In the following essay, he discusses Garcia Marquez's short fiction, including "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," which he calls a "folklore science-fiction."

Had Garcia Marquez never put any of his novels to paper, his shorter fiction would have still gained him some niche in literary history. Already in 1967 the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti was to observe that "some of the stories gathered in Big Mama's Funeral can be considered among the most perfect instances of the genre ever written in Latin America." We might venture yet further and say that those pieces, along with the novella No One Writes to the Colonel and the stories collected in Garcia Marquez the socialist well knows that the imagination and its dreams are as crucial a force in political life as is economic fact."

Innocent Erendira, put Garcia Marquez in the...