The publishing house will publish the novel in all Spanish-speaking countries except Mexico.

A text by Samantha G. Núñez

Around 1999, Gabriel García Márquez was in “La casa de América en Madrid” presenting a collection of unpublished stories. Out of the four stories the collection had, he chose to read just one during the presentation, later submitting it to The New Yorker. Said story would become one of the many chapters of the novel titled «Meeting in August», a work Márquez never published due to constant rewrites of the ending. Little is known about the plot, we know that it follows Ana Magdalena Bach, a fifty-two-year-old woman with a twenty-three-year marriage, who has travelled to a Caribbean island every August for the past twenty-eight years in order to visit her mother’s grave. During her most recent journey, she meets a mysterious man at the hotel bar where she’s staying and decides to have a one night stand.

After García Márquez’s death, his personal archive, which consisted of manuscripts, photographs, newspapers notes, reviews, and more, was sold to The University of Texas at Austin for the Harry Ransom Center. Part of the received material was digitised for general public access, but the other part was not. One of the items that wasn’t catalogued for general access in the digitization of García Márquez’s archives was that mythical manuscript read and heard by a few fortunate people. Perhaps, we could’ve thought that it would remain archived and only taken out for expertise analysis but never to be read by people outside that academic institution. However, this year on April 5th, Penguin Random House released a statement announcing the publication of this work in 2024, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the author’s death. The publishing house will release the novel in all Spanish-speaking countries except for Mexico, where it will be published by Grupo Planeta under the Diana imprint.

References

CONTENTdm. (n.d.). Oclc.org. Retrieved 15 June 2023, from https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll51/search/page/1

La novela inédita de Gabriel García Márquez «En agosto nos vemos» será publicada por Random House, un sello de Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, en 2024. (2023, May 4). Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. https://www.penguinrandomhousegrupoeditorial.com/novela-inedita-gabriel-garcia-marquez-sera-publicada-por-random-house-2024/

Márquez, G. G. (1999b). Meeting in August. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/12/06/meeting-in-august-translated-from-the-spanish-by-edith-grossman

Mora, R. (1999). Gabriel García Márquez seduce al público con la lectura de un cuento inédito. El País. https://elpais.com/diario/1999/03/19/cultura/921798001_850215.html

Image reference

judymccleery. (n.d.). Typewriter, Smith corona, Keys image. https://pixabay.com/photos/typewriter-smith-corona-keys-1183992/