Staff Pick
Borges's writing is as labyrinthian as his themes, and his stories have continued to puzzle and delight me since I first read them a decade ago. Fantastical and magical to the max, his characters traverse hexagonal libraries and impossible theoretical worlds, attempt to understand limitless books and find themselves trapped and devastated by their own astounding powers of memorization. Whether you're interested in Borges's vast influences and influence or just love a good riddle, I've found few other writers with such power to defamiliarize the familiar. Delightfully strange and provocative. Recommended By SitaraG, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges's Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. For to enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lie Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.
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"Without Borges the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist." Carlos Fuentes
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"Borges's composed, carefully wrought, gnarled style is at once the means of his art and its object his way of ordering and giving meaning to the bizarre and terrifying world he creates: it is a brilliant, burnished instrument, and it is quite adequate to the extreme demands his baroque imagination makes of it....Absolutely and most vividly original." Saturday Review
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"These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power. A strange and formidable writer, Sr. Borges is also a magisterial stylist even in translation." Atlantic Monthly
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"In resounding the note of the marvelous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterson, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, [Borges] has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place." John Updike
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"These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power" The Atlantic Monthly
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"Borges is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes." Mario Vargas Llosa
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"[Borges] engages the heart as well as the intelligence; his genius strikes, undismayed as Theseus, through the labyrinths of our life and time to the accomplishment of new, inspiring and stunningly beautiful work." John Barth
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"One of the finest, subtlest, and least appreciated of comedians...[Borges is] a central fact of Western culture." The Washington Post Book World
About the Author
Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires and educated in Europe. Borges is considered "the prime mover in that impressive series of novels which included Cortazar's Hopscotch, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers" (The Nation). Immediately upon the U.S. publication of Ficciones in 1962, Time magazine hailed Borges as "the greatest living writer in the Spanish language." His other books include Labyrinths and A Personal Anthology, a collection of short stories, essays, poems, and brief sketches.