Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she explores the surrealistic aspects of Colombia in 1990.

To many North American readers, the world described so starkly in García Márquez's News of a Kidnapping is a world hardly fathomable. Upon its publication, numerous reviewers pointed out that the fantastical story could have been drawn from the pages of one of García Márquez's magical realist novels. However, as García Márquez has stated on several occasions, every event in the book represents the truth as best the former journalist could uncover it—testament to the sad fact that in 1990, what North America found to be surreal and shocking, Colombia perceived as quite ordinary. To García Márquez, and...