Memories of My Melancholy Whores (original Spanish-language title: Memoria de mis putas tristes) is a novella

Novella

A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...

 by Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...

.

The book was originally published in Spanish in 2004, with an English translation by Edith Grossman

Edith Grossman

Edith Grossman is an award-winning American translator specializing in English versions of Spanish language books. She is one of the most important translators of Latin American fiction in the past century, translating the works of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate Gabriel García...

 published in October 2005.

Plot

As with María dos Prazeres in Strange Pilgrims

Strange Pilgrims

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve loosely-related short stories by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez....

, the protagonist, an old man, finds love at the end of his life, when he only waits for death. This is the story of a relationship of love and sex between an aging journalist and a working-class child, who sells her virginity to help her family.

The action of the story takes place on or after the narrator's 90th birthday.

Banning in Iran

A Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

 edition of Memories of My Melancholy Whores was published in Iran

Iran

Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...

 in October 2007, under the title Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts. The first edition of 5,000 sold out within three weeks of publication, after which it was banned, after the Ministry of Culture

Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance

The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is the ministry of Culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is responsible for restricting access to any media of which the Islamic Regime in Tehran does not approve....

 received complaints from conservatives who believed the novel was promoting prostitution.

Editions in print

• ISBN 1-4000-9580-8: Vintage; Spanish original, trade paperback
• ISBN 1-4000-9594-8: Vintage; English translation, US paperback
• ISBN 1-4000-4460-X: Knopf; English translation, US hardback
• ISBN 0-224-07764-3: Jonathan Cape; English translation, UK hardback
• ISBN 80-207-1187-2: Odeon; Czech translation, hardback
• ISBN 5-98358-161-9: Online; Russian translation, paperback
• ISBN 3-596-17259-4: Fischer; German translation, paperback
• ISBN 85-01-07265-6: Record; Brazilian Portuguese translation, paperback
• ISBN 83-7319-778-8: Muza; Polish translation with censored title, hardback
• ISBN 2-84305-784-x: Mada; Arabic translation, paperback

External links

• Complete Review review
• The New Yorker review
• Page on Metacritic.com
• Fantastic Fiction page
• Film Based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez Book Prompts Protest in Mexico by The Los Angeles Times
• 'The Nonagenarian and the Nymphette', review in the Oxonian Review