Gabriel García Márquez shocked me in the prologue of Strange Pilgrims. I’m binge-reading some of his most popular books. Love in Times of Cholera was the last one. I’m not ready yet for One Hundred Years of Solitude. But in the meantime, I picked up Strange Pilgrims, a collection of short stories that take place outside his hometown. Here’s an excerpt of the prologue: “When I started Chronicles of a Deaht Foretold, in 1979, I confirmed the fact that in the pauses between books I tended to lose the habit of writing, and it was becoming more and more difficult...