Colombia is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, with more recorded bird and orchid species than any other country on earth. For years, though, much of the outside world clung to a single story about it: a brutal chapter from the 1980s and 90s that international media, and later prestige television, let stand in for the entire book. The distance between what a place is and what the world decides to say about it is painful everywhere it happens — but in Colombia it has produced something unexpected: a literature of unusual precision and force, a musical tradition whose roots reach back before the republic, and a cultural reflex for complexity that quietly resists any easy verdict. The books are ferocious. The food is stranger and more tender than most visitors are prepared for. And the light — everyone who arrives ends up talking about the light, that equatorial saturation that makes even a blank wall look like it means something.
This issue goes looking for what remains when the easy story is no longer enough.
✦ Books ✦
Gabriel García Márquez and Álvaro Mutis are already on your shelf, or they should be. This issue goes elsewhere.