Product Description

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated "Library of Babel".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4878 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-28
• Original language: Spanish
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
This is a collection, in translation, of the short, the very short stories, and a few of the critical essays of Argentina's most avant-garde writer. He was born of mixed Spanish, English, and remotely Portuguese-Jewish ancestry in Buenos Aires in 1899, inheriting as well the flux and inconsistency of a far-flung border area of Western culture. Borges began his litarary career as a poet, and then turned to these prose-poem stories and fables. They display an intellectual pyrotechnical brilliance, carried to the farthest limit. Borge's nihilism also far outstrips Sartre or Becket, and in comparison with his elegance, invention and universal culture, they are not much more than bourgeois humanists. This Argentinian, with a cabalistic turn of mind, takes all literature, philosophy and metaphysics as his domain and they become, as Andre Maurois says in his preface, "a game of the mind". Borges seeks to astonish and does so successfully. His readership, while perhaps minimal, will find him exciting. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. A poet, critic and short story writer, he received numerous awards for his work including the 1961 International Publisher's Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett). He died in 1986. He has a reasonable claim, with Kafka and Joyce, to be the most influential writer of the 20th Century.

Customer Reviews

Pure Genius
I could go on praising Borges for many, many pages, but (just as he was), I will be short:
Borges style and content are utterly original: his metaphysical themes, his detached wit and wry humour, his extremely concise writing. Borges predicted the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics in "The Garden of Forking Paths" almost 20 years before Everett and DeWitt. Borges was writing about reader response in "Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote" more than 20 years before it became a method of literary criticism. In his stories, he often shows off his biblically immense erudition

Every word in Borges short stories have been carefully chosen, weighed and evaluated, and it shows: in just a few pages he manages to present varied, multi-layered themes that many other writers don't manage to fit in a novel.

His themes include, but are never limited to: the infinite, time, books and manuscripts, strange objects, the world seen from unexpected points of view, theology, and idealism.

While his main medium is the short story, he also wrote many non-fiction essays (some of the best of which, such as the exceptional "A New Refutation of Time", are included in "Labyrinths"), poetry, translations, and he excelled in the highly uncommon genre of the literary forgery.

Each page contains a sparkling gem
This collection of short stories has long been a favourite of mine. Borges is a master of the genre, packing more into a single line than some authors manage in a chapter. Time, death, love and religion are recurring themes, each handled with skill and awe-inspiring perspicacity.

Personally I think the first story is a bit of a shot to the head if you're not used to his style. Maybe try The Immortal for starters. After one or two, you'll be hooked and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius won't make your brain hurt. Well, that's what it did to me ! !

This is definitely one of the books you should have read before you die.

infinity within a book.
Borges claimed 'if you can summarise something in ten minutes, then why should you do anything else?' and true to this he has made his name by writing amongst the most exquisitely formed short stories of all time. Each story deals with grand themes: In Tlon Uqbar a plan is revealed to pervert the real world, by making it believe in an alien civilisation, whose systems of believe focus upon philosophy rather than religion. Thus, bizarre instances occur, such as people believing, rather ironically, that time and movement do not exist. The Library of Babel is a story set inside a mysterious library, where people's sole purpose is the examination and exegesis of an effectively infinite collection of books filled with every possible permutation of words and non-words. Cults thrive around books containing only three letters and myths are spread among the people of books tellling their future... given the endless possibilities of the library's contents such a book surely exists for every person.
Every short story though, is as good as the next. Each has its own self-contained idea or outlook on the world, yet each is in some way or another a Labyrinth. This collection is a masterpiece. The essays are just as good as the stories, because they too, almost peturbingly, seem to cope with the idea of the infinite effortlessly, whilst leaving you exhilerated.