Throughout his life, Gabriel García Márquez spoke publicly with the same passion and energy that marked his writing. Now the wisdom and compassion of these performances are available in English for the first time. I'm Not Here to Give a Speech records key events throughout the author's life, from a farewell to his classmates delivered when he was only seventeen to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Written across a lifetime, these speeches chart

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit—he has purchased hundreds of women—he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a

Consumed these past twenty years by a "biblical holocaust," Colombia has endured leftist insurgencies, right-wing death squads, currency collapses, cholera epidemics, and, most recently and corrosively, drug trafficking. Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless