"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is another story by Garcia Marquez that features a stranger's arrival in a seaside village.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa in 1970, is Garcia Marquez's landmark magic realism novel about a marvelous village, Macondo, and its equally wondrous founding family.

One of the most important influences on Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier's 1949 novel, The Kingdom of this World, is a magic realist look at Haiti's troubled history through the eyes of a slave.

Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel, Gulliver's Travels, is the story of a man washed ashore on foreign lands. The reception Gulliver receives in this satirical comment on human nature is quite different from the love given to Esteban in Garcia Marquez's story.

The Old Man and the Sea, written in 1952 by Ernest Hemingway, is a classic story of human nature...