Maqroll the Gaviero (the Lookout) is one of the most alluring and memorable characters in the fiction of the last twenty-five years. His extravagant and hopeless undertakings, his brushes with the law and scrapes with death, and his enduring friendships and unlooked-for love affairs make him a Don Quixote for our day, driven from one place to another by a restless and irregular quest for the absolute. Alvaro Mutis's seven dazzling chronicles of the adventures and misadventures of Maqroll have won him numerous honors and a passionately devoted readership throughout the world. Here for the first time in English all these wonderful stories appear in a single volume in Edith Grossman's prize-winning translation.

In 1720, Antonio Stradivari crafted an exquisite work of art-a cello known as the Piatti. Over the next three centuries of its life, the Piatti cello left its birthplace of Cremona, Italy, and resided in Spain, Ireland, England, Italy, Germany, and the United States. In 1978, the Piatti became the musical soul mate of world-renowned cellist Carlos Prieto, with whom it has given concerts around the world. In this delightful book, Mr. Prieto recounts the adventurous life of his beloved "Cello Prieto," tracing its history through each of its previous owners from Stradivari in 1720 to himself. He then describes his noteworthy experiences of playing the Piatti cello, with which he has premiered some eighty compositions. In this part of their mutual story, Prieto gives a concise summary of his own remarkable career and his relationships with many illustrious personalities, including Igor Stravinsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Pablo Casals, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A new epilogue, in which he describes recent concert tours in Moscow, Siberia, and China and briefer visits to South Korea, Taiwan, and Venezuela, as well as recent recitals with Yo-Yo Ma, brings the story up to 2009. To make the story of his cello complete, Mr. Prieto also provides a brief history of violin making and a succinct review of cello music from Stradivari to the present. He highlights the work of composers from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, for whose music he has long been an advocate and principal performer. The print edition of this book includes a CD of fourteen recordings by Carlos Prieto, including works by J. S. Bach, Dmitry Shostakovich, Astor Piazzolla, and Eugenio Toussaint.

A los sesenta y tres años, Álvaro Mutis retomó el personaje que había aparecido esporádicamente en su poesía y lo convirtió en la figura central de un ciclo narrativo compuesto por siete novelas, escritas entre 1986 y 1993, a las que el propio autor dio la título general de Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero. Esta edición recoge el ciclo ficcional completo de Maqroll el Gaviero, protagonista de siete novelas: La nieve del Almirante, Ilona llega con la lluvia, Un bel morir, La última escala del Tramp Steamer, Amirbar, Abdul Bashur, soñador de navíos , y Tríptico de mar y tierra. Maqroll el Gaviero se ha ganado un lugar como uno de los personajes míticos de la literatura universal. En palabras de Javier Reverte, constituye "un verdadero monumento de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea."