WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Jan. 25, 2010 -- The University of North Carolina Press has announced issue of a second edition of "Garcia Marquez: The Man and His Work," revised and expanded by Gene H. Bell-Villada, professor of Romance Languages at Williams College.

Marquez, author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera" is one of the most influential writers of our time. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Originally published in 1990, Bell-Villada's book has been updated to include all of Garcia Marquez's fiction since 1988, including "The General in His Labyrinth," "Of Love and Other Demons," and his memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale."

In the new edition of his book, Bell-Villada also explores Marquez's biography and his writing to explain how Marquez's life influenced his work.

The influence of Marquez's work in his own culture is apparent when travelling through the southern hemisphere. Indeed, Bell-Villada cites one U.S. Journalist who recalls an entire bus in Caracas engrossed in conversation about "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

But Bell-Villada also analyzes Marquez's novels in relation to other prominent authors, including Faulkner, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, and shows the importance of Marquez's works internationally.

Bell-Villada is the author of six scholarly works as well as a memoir and two books of fiction.  His first edition of "Garcia Marquez" won the 1991 Best Book Prize from the New England Council of Latin American Studies. His 1997 work, "Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life," was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. His most recent book, a memoir, is titled, "Overseas American: Growing up Gringo in the Tropics."

Bell-Villada was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1979, and a grant from the American Philosophical Society in 1982. At Williams, he has taught Intermediate Spanish, Latin American Civilization, The Latin American Novel in Translation, among others.

He earned his B.A. from the University of Arizona, his M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has been at Williams since 1975.

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News: Meira Bernstein