Collected Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges - Author
Andrew Hurley - Translator
ISBN 9780140286809 | 576 pages | 01 Sep 1999 | Penguin | 5.74 x 8.38in | 18 - AND UP
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The complete fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, whom Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa calls “the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes” A New York Times Notable Book The International Bestseller For the first time in English, all of the best Latin American writer Jorge Luis Borges’s dazzling fictions are collected in a single volume in brilliant new translations by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges’s talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story, Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, Borges took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth, this edition at last brings together all of Borges’s magical short stories. Collected Fictions is the definitive one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the Argentine master’s work for those who have yet to discover him. Preface to the First Edition Preface to the 1954 Edition The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro The Widow Ching - Pirate Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv Man on Pink Corner Et cetera Index of Sources
Fictions (1944)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Artifices (1944)
The Aleph (1949)
The Maker (1960)
Museum
In Praise of Darkness (1969)
Brodie's Report (1970)
The Book of Sand (1975)
Shakespeare's Memory (1983)
A Note on the Translation “A marvelous new collection of stories by one of the most remarkable writers of our century.” —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times “The major work of probably the most influential Latin American writer of the century.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World “An unparalleled treasury of marvels . . . Along with a tiny cohort of peers, and seers (Kafka and Joyce come to mind), Borges is more than a stunning storyteller and a brilliant stylist; he’s a mirror who reflects the spirit of his time.” —Melvin Jules Bukiet, Chicago Tribune “An event worth of celebration . . . Hurley deserves our enthusiastic praise for this monumental piece of work.” —William Hjortsberg, San Francisco Chronicle “Borges is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes. . . . To have denied him the Nobel Prize is as bad as the case of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka.” —Mario Vargas Llosa |
