Works Ángel Esteban

De Gabo a Mario, Ángel Esteban & Ana Gallego (Espasa Calpe, January 2009)

This book tells the story of the friendship between the two best novelists of the Latin American boom and probably the two most important Spanish-language writers of the twentieth century: García Márquez and Vargas Llosa. But it goes beyond the friendship, tracing the roots of the boom and describing other parallel friendships (Cortázar, Fuentes, Carpentier, Borges, Sábato, Edwards. etc), the atmosphere of Paris and Barcelona in the 1960s and 1970s, the spread of communism and consumerism in the “happy days” of utopias, the relationship with the cultural world of the Cuban revolution and Allende’s Chile, in the times when dictators ruled in Argentina, Peru and Colombia.

While an alluring subject in themselves, the story of these two literary figures has an added attraction: from being the best of friends, they became the worst of enemies. No one has found out why, although speculation has abounded. Ángel Esteban and Ana Gallego broach this question in their book, disclosing hitherto unknown information. It all goes back to the mid-1970s. Mario and Gabo have never breathed a word about what happened, even though they have had much to say about each other over the past 30 years. The closer García Márquez has moved towards Cuba and communism, the farther away Vargas Llosa has stepped from his revolutionary teenage days.

Gabo y Fidel. El paisaje de una amistad, Ángel Esteban & Stéphanie Panichelli (Espasa Calpe, 2004)

The two most charismatic characters of twentieth-century Latin America, Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez, have publicly declared their friendship, embracing a personal, political and literary relationship. For years Castro did not allow the Colombian Nobel Prize winner to approach his island den, only later succumbing openly to his conspiratorial flattery. Obsessed by power, caudillos and high-flying diplomatic mediation, Gabo viewed the Cuban patriarch as the model on which Latin America would one day be able to build its own brand of socialism. Without an intellectual on the island to propagate his revolutionary achievements, Castro found in García Márquez the cleverest man the Caribbean had produced since the time of cholera. Gabo, who had always rejected propositions from political parties and Colombian leaders to become minister, ambassador or president, started campaigning in his own right, encircling power, controlling and directing it, ruling without a sceptre, carrying proposals to countries as the unique ambassador and Siamese twin of the ‘bearded commander’. This book tells the thrilling story of the relationship between those two men, sketching the landscape of their friendship and its secrets.

Foreign Editions:
- Studio Emka Klara Molnar (Poland), 2006
- Ambar (Portugal), 2007
- Shinchosha (Japan), 2009
- Pegasus Books (USA), 2009
- Dogan Egmont (Turkey), 2011
- Yemun Publishing (Korea), 2011
- Gold Wall Press (China), 2011

Cuando llegan las musas (Cómo trabajan los grandes escritores), Ángel Esteban & Raúl Cremades (Espasa Calpe, 2002)

How could Miguel Delibes or Buero Vallejo concentrate on their writing while their children played around them? Why did Carmen Martín Gaite die gripping her notebooks? How was it possible for Rafael Alberti to create one of his most beautiful love poems ‘La paloma’, in the loneliness of a sad night? Why does Vargas Llosa write surrounded by hippopotamus figures? How did Saramago first get the idea for Blindness? Why does García Márquez need a yellow flower on his table to be able to work? And why do all the novels of Isabel Allende start on the same date, 8th January?
Cuando llegan las musas not only answers these questions and many others, but also provides the keys to understand the relationship between the passion and craft of writing, between inspiration and hard work, between the most sublime and the most banal moments of literary creation.

Raúl Cremades and Ángel Esteban delve brilliantly and meticulously into the experience and thoughts of sixteen of the greatest figures of twentieth-century Spanish, Latin American and Portuguese literature.