There is an established tradition of Latin American novelists who started off as journalists. Before breaking out with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez made a living writing columns, film criticism, and political commentary. Carlos Fuentes did similar work for newspapers in Mexico City. Even Clarice Lispector, the experimental mystic of Brazilian letters, published weekly crônicas for a Saturday periodical in Rio de Janeiro. Long before charting new literary territory in their fiction, these writers embraced style and subjectivity in their journalism. Fernanda Melchor, author of the newly-translated collection This Is Not Miami, has followed a similar trajectory.
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