Gabriel García Márquez  once said: “I do not want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspapers.” A new collection of his journalism, Dwight Garner writes in The New York Times, shows how seriously the novelist took reportage — and how scary he found flying.

Airplanes figure often in García Márquez’s journalism. He hated to fly. About air travel after he became famous, he wrote: “I always fly so frightened that I don’t even notice how anyone treats me, and all my energy goes into gripping my seat with my hands to hold it up in order to help the plane stay up in the air, or trying to keep children from running in the aisles for fear they’ll break through the floor.”