Gabriel García Márquez

Leaf Storm
No One Writes to the Colonel
Evil Hour
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Autumn of the Patriarch
Innocent Eréndira
Collected Stories
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Collected Novellas
Love in the Time of Cholera
The General in his Labyrinth
Strange Pilgrims
Love and Other Demons
Memoria de mis putas tristes

They're evocative beyond compare, gemlike even in translation, metaphysically challenging and … eesh … like Gogol on Ayahuesca, Kafka on Yage.

I started reading the shorts when in high school. In a sophomore English class I was assigned 'Handsomest Drowned Man in the World' and 'Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' and fell in love with both. I progressed to 'Evil Hour' and tackled the big novels before college. Backfilling the journalistic pieces and lesser long fiction while an undergrad, I eventually settled into a post-graduate groove with the shorter fictions, read on weekends and vacations. Since then I've read two critical bios and his memoirs, as well as a slew of essays on him, mostly useless.

Except maybe for Jack London and Henri Alain-Fornier, I don't know of Gabo's equal in rendering atmospherically-charged prose while avoiding adjectival muckiness.

During 2000-1 I wrote two stylistically-derivative (though I'd prefer to say 'inspired') pieces 'Green Tide, Forthcoming' and 'Dream Pang' ... also influenced by the Frost poem... that're somewhere available on the web. GT,F has a long discourse on Gabo's influence and importance, but what it says that's basically important is that you try – even if you don't know a wisp of the Spanish language – to understand the cadences of GGMs writing; the rhythms and convolutions that make GGM uniquely GGM, the turns of phrase allowing and promoting his flights of fantasy, the cues that our dominant mode of textual comprehension (parsing) should be verbal and not literary… etc… etc…

One Hundred Years Of Solitude is now a Netflix show and getting good reviews. I loved the book when I read it in my 20s, will have to give the show a shot.