Collected Stories (36 page)

‘A gripping tale of survival’
The Times

‘On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Colombia …’

In 1955, eight crew members of
Caldas
, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on
a raft for ten days without food or water. Márquez retells the survivor’s amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
was Márquez’s first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, 
El Espectador
, in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.

‘The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks
over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. Reads like an epic’
Independent

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This collection first published by Jonathan Cape 1991
First published in Penguin Books 1996
This edition published 2014

Copyright © Gabriel García Márquez, 1954, 1961, 1972
English translations copyright © Harper
& Row, Publishers, Inc., 1968, 1972, 1978

Cover © Steve McCurry / Magnum Photos

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

“Bitterness for Sleepwalkers” first appeared in
Translation
; “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” in
New American Review
; “The Sea of Lost Time” in the
New Yorker
; “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” in
Playboy
; “Death Constant Beyond Love”
in
Atlantic Monthly
; and “Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles” and “The Incredible Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” in
Esquire

“Big Mama’s Funeral” was originally published as “Los Funerales de la Mama Grande”
Copyright © Universidad Veracruzana, Vera Cruz, Mexico

ISBN: 978-0-141-91745-0