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In this excerpt from Solitude & Company, Silvana Paternostro's rollicking oral biography of Gabriel García Márquez, catch a glimpse into Márquez's writing process as he molds what's to become his defining masterpiece. 

A few years ago, I began losing many of the people I love. One of the difficult things about coming from a culture where your extended familia is considered your "nuclear" family is that you don't just lose a set of parents, a couple of aunts and uncles, but dozens upon dozens of tías, tíos, madrinas, padrinos, abuelitas, abuelitos.  A whole flank of familia is suddenly gone.

My parents joined that clan exodus, dying within five months of each other. Actually, I had been losing both incrementally to Alzheimer's over several years.  Each time I returned to the Dominican Republic to look after their care and visit with them, I'd braced myself for the day when they wouldn't know who I was.  No matter how old you get, while your parents are living, you are still somebody's "child."

Their loss, though painful, was in the natural order of things. But then came a loss I was not expecting: my older sister committed suicide.  

To usher in back-to-school season, we've put up a free e-book of Robert Graves's witty, unorthodox writing handbook, The Reader Over Your Shoulder. The promotion lasts through September 11, 5PM EST.

Here on the blog, you can find an excerpt from the first chapter, "The Peculiar Qualities of English." Scholarly and thorough, but never pedantic or doctrinaire, the piece demonstrates why grammar maven Patricia T. O'Conner calls The Reader Over Your Shoulder "the best book on writing ever published."

There’s also the question of stakes. Even before Walsh knows the stakes of what he’s doing, he conveys a kind of urgency. His encounter with this unbearable situation comes across on the page. It’s so honest.

Introducing Three Cheers, a new series in which Seven Stories authors dish on three books that have inspired them over the course of their writing careers. In this installment, Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart and, most recently, The Cuban Club, dusts off some lesser known works of fiction for his three picks.