The third and final jewel in the crown of Viking's acclaimed three-volume centenary edition of Borges's collected works in English.

Though best known in the United States for his short fictions and poems Jorge Luis Borges is just as revered in Latin America as an immensely prolific writer of nonfiction prose. Now, following on the success of the critically acclaimed Fictions, Viking's Selected Non-Fictions brings more than 150 of Borges's most brilliant writings together for the first time in one volume — all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been translated into English.

Even Borges aficionados are sure to be amazed to discover the extent of the master's interests. Like the Aleph in his famous story — the magical point in a certain basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world — Borges's unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his nonfiction, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe. He was equally at home with Schopenhauer and Ellery Queen, King Kong and the Kabbalists, James Joyce or Alfred Hitchcock, Flaubert, the Buddha, and the Dionne Quints!

The first comprehensive selection of this work in any language, the Selected Non-Fictions presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe.

"Of all Latin American authors in this century, he is the most universal....If you read Borges frequently and closely, you become something of a Borgesian, because to read him is to activate an awareness of literature in which he has gone farther than anyone else." Harold Bloom

"Borges' essays are unforgettable, most of all for their originality, their diversity, and for the writing itself. Humor, restraint, insight — and then, suddenly, something bizarre. No one before had written like that in Spanish. He served two contrary gods, simplicity and strangeness, and that ability, which perhaps can never be repeated, gives him a unique place in twentieth-century literature....All comparisons are deceptive: Borges, above all, resembles Borges." Octavio Paz

Includes bibliographical references (p. [523]-548) and index.